Movies that arrive at festivals like Sankranti (Pongal), Dussehra, or Eid and Onam– for Malayalees– will aim to have a special quality of being all-pleaser family entertainers. Tonivo Thomas’s ARM is an entertaining watch for this Onam Festival.
The idea of having a single hero playing a double role is to give two heroes for the single ticket price. Here, for the price of one, you get three Tovino Thomas’es in this highly ambitious movie ARM directed by Jithin Lal.
The Trio of Tovino
Tovino Thomas plays the three generational grey characters named Kunji Kelu, Maniyan, Ajayan. There is a brilliant play of writing by Sijith Nambiar. While Kunji gets almost the status of a saviour in the popular folklore, the next generation Maniyan gets the honour of a thief who has the ‘revolutionary thoughts’ of an angry young hero who gets the treatment of energised unleashed beast. Ajayan is that reluctant hero who tries to disassociate with his lineage, yet falls in the eventual rightful trap of upholding the honour of their identity.
Underwriting dominates Decent Plot
Apart from writing a good visually scalable plot, the writing is a complete mess of archetypes stuffed in to makeKeerthy Shetty a heroine and her father as a villain from an oppressive caste. There is nothing deep in these characters that makes us feel with them. We are just in here for the Indiana Jones level of action-adventure delivered as the commentary of identity and caste.
Issues of Identity
Although the main plot of folklore-adventure is around the lamp/idol that has dropped at Haripuram as the celestial object, the interesting writing takes place in the sub-plot that revolves around the identity and civilian rights which has been degraded even down the level of sub-plot. These socio-political elements remain standing far away from the main plot, slightly peeking into the story just to remind us that the story written by Sujith Nambiar isn’t happening in the social vacuum.
Overall, ARM is a decent masala movie coming from an industry that is known for its sensible and decently budgeted films. ARM is an enjoyable entertaining festival movie for this Onam season.
Rating : 3/5
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