CHRISTOPHER, WITH LITTLE TO OFFER

What can you say about a movie that is an endless parade of predictable clichés right from the word go? Watching it till the end was like watching a train derail on a bridge — you know what to expect, but can’t take your eyes off. You watch, transfixed, just to see if something will come along to rescue it. Nothing did, in this case. The train went completely off the track and took everything with it into the river below. Sunk without a trace.

‘Christopher’ rings alarm bells right from its tagline, “The Biography of a Vigilante Cop”. Suffice it to say that it is literally the entire plot in one line. We are mute spectators to the tried-and-tested trope of a ‘wronged’ teenager who transforms into an ‘encounter’ cop, whose go-to plan of action is a quick shoot-to-kill. While it makes for simple problem-solving (because you have to act on your own when the ‘system’ fails you, needless to say!), and gives ample opportunity for Mammootty to look poker-faced while pulling the trigger in slow motion or mouthing “Justice delayed is justice denied” to a bunch of reporters surrounding him as he steps into his Pajero to mark the point for the cinematic ‘INTERVAL’.

All this would have been sufferable for the sake of watching Mammootty as a fanboi (I’m speaking of myself here), but this movie comes at the terrible cost of watching an assortment of woman characters get raped and killed throughout the narrative, in the most brutal of manners possible — with ample allusions to the infamous Nirbhaya case — and sitting through cliché after cliché and typecast acting by the usual supporting actors. A little into the movie you realize that if new characters pop up in the story, they will soon become the next subplot, with the women, of course, suffering needless violence in various forms. Tiring.

Did I mention that Christopher is the head of the Division for Preventing Crime Against Women in the movie? Well, how’s that for irony?

What begins as an investigation into the disappearance-turned-murder case of two orphan girls turns into an intra-departmental investigation (led by a woman cop with a connected subplot of her own) into the character and questionable tactics of ADGP Christopher, IPS. The story then meanders through a catalogue of subplots longer than the shopping list of groceries for an ‘Onam Sadya’ to end, very predictably, in Christopher’s exoneration and reinstatement as a force to reckon with. Obviously.

Watch it if only for research purposes. Like for your PhD on why one section of the Malayalam film industry still suffers from a dearth of material to make good movies with the superstars, or that hit piece on why or how Mammootty says yes to these projects. Wait, don’t. There is an audience for this kind of movie in Kerala, as the box-office will prove. Sigh.

More information here:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21819994/