Review of L2 (Empuraan) – (available in 5 languages on jio hotstar)

The Mohan Lal produced and acted movie Empuraan  touted as the costliest Malayalam movie launched on an ambitious scale, is full of grandeur, gloss and execution. After all these years at last Malayalam industry, known for its realistic and content driven movies, has bitten the bullet and joined the bandwagon of other southern industry namely Telugu, Tamil and Kannada in making meaningless mass masala commercial movies.   It has came close on heels of Marco which received lot of flak for its meaningless and extreme violence.   Like a Rajni, Chiranjeevi or Prabhas movies the director has gone for more elevation shots and put more focus in presenting larger than life image of Mohanlal and, giving credit where it is due, he succeeded to a great extent, right from the never seen before intro scene where Mohanlal alights from a huge aircraft in a Hollywood style.

The strongest aspects of the movie are its rich visual appeal, large-scale action sequences specially the action scenes in the Church and forest, and Mohanlal’s transformation from simple family man image in Drishyam series to Action image.   The best thing gifted actor director Pridhviraj Sukumar has done is, unlike many Indian movies including RRR, the foreign characters/actors are not Indianised and not made them to speak indianised English or broken Hindi/regional language.  All the foreigner characters in the movie so wonderfully acted by foreign actors, have retained their accent, body language acting style as if they are acting in a Hollywood movie.   But unfortunately like many other characters all these foreign characters are under developed to such an extent that you will wonder why they were there in the first place and narrative would have moved even without them. One really wishes they were given more screen time.   When the story goes back to Kerala politics and gets linked to first part Lucifer the movies lost its tempo.    As per me Prithviraj should have gone for an out and out action movie in lines of MI having spent so much in shooting various countries in stunning locations, hiring so many foreign actors and technicians, lavishly mounted action scenes rather than carrying the hangover of Lucifer which didn’t serve any purpose.  

The producer and director have unnecessarily created an avoidable controversy by making references to the Godhra incident, the Gujarat riots, the violent massacre of Muslims by villain named as “Baba Bajrangi”.   As expected, this was not taken as coincidence or not as an act without malafide intensions, and there was a back lash from certain quarters but the fire was quickly doused by Mohanlal apologising and assuring deleting of controversial scenes immediately after release of the movie.   Not sure whether the version available on the OTT is the toned down version or the original.   Whatever it may be that scene has no relevance to the movie and looked like an irrelevant patch work done for reasons best known to Mohanlal and Pridhviraj

Its an out and out Mohanlal movie and even at an advanced age, Mohanlal did not look out of place in action scenes and exhibited his own swag.   How I wish his swag and lavishly mounted elevation and action scenes are support by an excellent back ground music, some thing like what is done by Keeravani for Bahubali or DSP for Pushpa.   The insipid BGM has really pulled down many critical moments in the movie.

Its Mohalal all the way and he carried the movie on his shoulder single handedly, all foreign actors were excellent, Hindi actor Abhimanyu Singh, as villain has spit fire by effective use of his powerful eyes, Manju Warrior was good and did matured acting, director Prithiviraj had a very briefly role but he looked dashing in that and one wishes that he allotted more screen time for himself.    

The movie did not do earth shattering business on a PAN India level but made Rs. 350 crores the highest for a Malayalam movie.    But surely it is going to do for Malayalam Industry what KGF has done to Kannada Industry, pushing it to big league to compete with Telugu and Tamil movies.    Marco and Empuraan gives them the required confidence that Malayalam producers and directors like Priviraj can pull off an out and out mega budget action movies.   But in future whenever they make an action movie they will be better served if they shake off the hang over from movies like Lucifer and go for a stand alone action masala entertainer.   The four pronged race among four South Indian language movies to make mega budget movies will be interesting to watch in days to come.

Can watch if you are an action movies buff like me.

S. Prabhakar

3.5.25