'Bazooka' review: Mammootty gets the worst kind of tribute — a 'game' where the audience becomes the loser

In Bazooka, there is a young gamer dude, played by Hakkim Shah, who keeps saying 'Bro' whenever he addresses Mammootty's character. He says it so many times that after the movie was over, I felt like this character had possessed me, like a ghost. So, my first thought after I left the theatre was, "Bro, what made Mammootty sign this movie, bro?" And it's not because of how annoying this gamer dude was that I asked this question. It's a combination of several factors, and not all of them can be fit in this review.

Bazooka is one of those movies that behaves like a person who, after seeing a lot of international movies, wishes they were born in some foreign country. Subtlety is not its strong suit. It borrows from Mammootty's The King to Ben Affleck's The Town — and not in a good way. It is so desperate to look Hollywood-ish (Renji Panicker movie-ish) that it even makes Binu Pappu sound like Vijay Menon — I spat out my coffee when he said "Exactly!" a couple of times while giving a lecture on different types of psychopaths.

Speaking of lectures, watching Bazooka feels quite like attending multiple classes taught by some of the most boring teachers who took a last-minute, late-night crash course on the subject they are supposed to teach the next day. The movie sometimes behaves like that pretentious guy from your college or office who is so eager to impress everyone with his presentation that in the end did the complete opposite because he sports a fake American accent and forgets to make his presentation more accessible. Everything about this movie is so amateurish that it reminded me of the stories that I used to dream up when I was 12 and later, at age 32, made me realise how ridiculous they were.  

Randomness, and I don't mean the good kind, is one of the notable qualities of this movie written and directed by Deeno Dennis. A lot of illogical things occur in Bazooka, and had it not shown me a certain scene towards the end recalling how the chain of events began, I would've forgotten about it. I wondered on more than one occasion whether I was watching a flashy commercial for an expensive clothing store or a vintage automobile seller.

All this is made worse by the use of a combination of rap music and multiple (and repetitive) slow-motion shots of Mammootty. None of the buildup, whether it's for Mammootty's introduction or the heist sequences, generates any sense of excitement. This movie would've probably been helped a little by, for example, being a little more elaborately exploring how these criminal gangs execute their heists. Instead, we get sequences that feel like discarded bits and pieces from the very Hollywood movies that may have inspired them.

And as for Mammootty's performance, well, first, this movie doesn't do justice to an actor (or star) of his calibre because Bazooka is one of the worst kinds of tributes and, second, whatever experiment that Mammootty or the makers of this film thought they were doing ends up falling flat. Since I don't want to give away anything, I'd rather just say the climax is a big joke, one that makes you want to use 'cringe ultra pro max' to describe your feelings about it. But that's what I would say for the entire film, too.

For a movie marketed as something unique that happens in the "gaming world", I expected something far more innovative. It expects you to be bowled over by how "intelligent" it is, but what it ends up doing is making you feel dumb and drained out in such a way that you don't feel like talking about it. Basically, it feels like playing a game where you lose multiple times in the first level itself. 

 

Movie: Bazooka

Director: Deeno Dennis

Cast: Mammootty, Hakkim Shah, Gautham Vasudev Menon, Iswarya Menon

Rating: 1/5

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