Rating: * ½
Raghu Menon’s Jawanum Mullappoovum probably had a decent idea to project,on the deleterious effects of excessive internet time. But the execution is so clumsy and inept it feel s like a highschool play on computer aesthetics blown out of proportion by characters written with as much subtlety as an axe poised over a goat’s next.
The first-half is all about Teacher Jayshree(Shivada Nair) and her armyman husband Giridhar(Sumesh Chandran) who seem to not like one another’s company at all.The scenes of marital discord are written like skits on Kapil Sharma’s comedy show.The acting is pure nautanki.
The writing(Suresh Krishnan) wrenches the character out of their organic domestic context, and makes them act embarrassingly out of character , like puppets on a string. For example, Giridhar doesn’t like his wife and daughter constantly on the internet at home. Instead of trying to do family things together, he huffs,puffs ,fumes and sneezes as his wife insists on cooking food stuff that he is allergic to.
This marriage needs a counsellor. Instead it gets a creepy computer techie (Rahul Madhav) who drops in one rainy night at Jayshree Teacher’s home while her husband and daughter are away, to fix her frozen computer .
Why couldn’t she do what we all do when the desktop computer acts too crazy to handle? Pull the plug?Why call a virtual stranger home at that time of the night? He is bound to see it as a psst-psst situation.
And even if Jayshree’s husband found objectionable content frozen on her computer why is it such a horrifying situation for Jayshree to be caught with adult content on her comp?I could understand a 12-year old boy panicking at the prospect of being pounced on by his parents with porn on the window.
But why a grownup women?
Weirder still is the computer expert landing up at her place post midnight and asking the housewife to change into a saree with a leery look that said all.Saree, but no saree.
Cheesy and absurd, Jawanum Mullappoovum is the motionpicture equivalent of a statutory warning ad on no smoking.You know the one with Akshay Kumar and Nandu? What if Nandu was an internet addict instead of a chain smoker?
