Rating: **
While watching this mindless masala mix of mayhem and melodrama, my primary thought was, I hope Mammootty fans will forgive him. Even Dilip Kumar did Quila at the end of his career.
Turbo brings out Mammootty’s Quila instinct (when a brilliant actor loses his rational mind). Friends must have advised the Malayali superstar to do something massy to get away from the sombre image of the closeted gay patriarch in Kaathal The Core. So Mr M does a flipflop, a Rajinikanth-meets-John Abraham, if you will, beating up several goons with one hand and clapping for himself with the other.
It is a terrible embarrassment to watch Mammootty “in and as” Turbo behave like a 25-30 year old Mama’s boy to an actress (Bindu Panicker) who must be the same age, and who bullies her 72-year old son as though he were 11.
Blessedly there is no romantic angle. The leading lady Indulekha(Anjana Jaiprakash) is Turbo’s best friend Jerry’s love interest.
This is just about the only favourable occurrence in a film that otherwise seems stuck in archaic concepts of villainy. The extraordinarily talented Kannada actor Raj B Shetty has been cast as the main villain primarily for the way he looks. It is terribly awkward to see the Roopanthara actor playing a ruthless slasher: at one point in the pedestrian plot he saunters into an office ,casually slashes a female employee’s throat for a computer error, and walks out like a masterchef after tasting an unappetizing dish.
The narration keeps looking for and finding every excuse to let Mammootty’s character galvanize into action. He doesn’t seem physically correct for the action-star’s part. But I guess superstar’s in Indian cinema are divinely empowered to combat age while beating up dozens of goons.
Whatever the fate of this limbless action drama might have been at the boxoffice, it is highly improper for an actor of Mammootty’s stature to be stretching his limbs rather than his acting chops, and that too in a film which seems designed for Rajinikanth.
The action pieces are quite often designed to be funny rather than fearsome: a local don named Auto Billa(Sunil) tries to dress and talk like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. This kind of deflected violence is meant to make the mayhem more viewer-friendly.
Regrettably, the plot creaks under the weight of overdone cliches and infantile heroics. The dramatic centre of the film, a massive bank scam masterminded by the archvillain, collapses even before the characters get a grip on themselves and the screenplay.
The only actor who gets our attention is Shabareesh Varma as Mammootty’s best friend. And he dies long before Mammootty’s infantile antics are over. WIP(wrest in peace).
