Marconi Mathai Review: a movie which is tough to sit through

Marconi Mathai from Sanil Kalathil will give you a clear idea about how bizarre a movie will look if it doesn’t demand a particular kind of treatment that the director is trying to forcefully include. It’s a movie that tries to stretch an extremely thin idea to an entire movie. The cameo appearance by Vijay Sethupathi is not enough to save this major mess that is overflowing with unreal goodness.

Marconi Mathai, our hero, is an ex-military. He is someone who is not interested in marriage. After all the family pressure to get married, Mathai eventually fell in love with a girl named Anna who came to work in the same bank where Mathai served as security. The repercussions of that love story are what Marconi Mathai showing us.

Movies trying to carry the element of goodness are not at all a bad thing. But as a viewer, the level of optimism should be on a sensible level. In Marconi Mathai, everything is on a superficial level. When any character becomes excessively perfect, it won’t evoke any sort of excitement in the viewer. The, you only live once, attitude may make you root for the movie to an extent. But after that when the movie sort of becomes a manhunt for Mathai, things go absolutely bizarre. The functioning of the FM station in this movie is really weird.

Jayaram is yet again repeating himself with only his looks having a slight change from the previous movie. His stock expressions are getting displayed yet again. Athmiya is becoming the face of sad heroines in Malayalam. Vijay Sethupathi is a pointless addition to this movie and anyone with common sense would realize that his role was added only to make the movie sellable. Tini Tom, Joy Mathew, Sudheer Karamana, Idavela Babu, Mukundan, Aju Varghese, Sidhartha Siva, and Ramesh Thilak , etc are the other known faces here.

Making things visually glossy and eye candy seems to be the aim of director Sanil Kalathil. Every location in this movie has flowers and colors. All of this is acceptable, but the sheer lack of content is what annoys you. Marconi Mathai is actually the charmless version of Charlie. The manhunt for Mathai that happens through an FM station program headed by Vijay Sethupathi leads to many intolerable moments. And in the movie, Vijay Sethupathi plays himself and he is promoting his movie by staying in Kerala for a week or month by hosting a radio show; what a thought. The eye candy cinematography isn't always the need of the movie. Songs are kind of nice.

The makers of the movie relying on Vijay Sethupathi’s 15 minutes instead of the 30 years plus experience of Jayaram itself shows how less confident they are about the content. Marconi Mathai is tedious and a tough to sit through. It will be passable only if you are unaware of the change that happened in the industry in recent years.