The star is game as always, but this thriller about ‘gaming’ is weakly written, and makes you wish they’d get to the point sooner. Plus, the endless stylisation really tests your patience. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
Right from the opening scene of Bazooka, something seems off. It’s one of those “Hollywood scenes”, something from a spy thriller where someone whispers a secret message to someone else, in an airport, and then walks away, leaving the “someone else” to do the job. But this “someone else” is dressed like a nun, and she doesn’t look like one at all. She is statuesque, like a fashion model, and she walks in her heels like a model would walk in a fashion show. It’s a deceptive scene, of course – but at least for that moment, we should buy this illusion (that this is indeed a nun), and we don’t. A little later, we get a Halloween party, where a young girl is almost lost amidst the costumed crowd. But again, something about the setting, the staging, feels off. Slowly, it becomes clear that Bazooka is a movie that wants to be cool but doesn’t quite know how, and the result is a tedious thriller.
The narrative takes a while to get going. There’s a cop named Benjamin Joshua (Gautham Vasudev Menon), and with his team, he has brought down the crime rate in Kochi. And now, Benjamin is the most celebrated cop in the country. But a new challenge awaits him in the form of a gang of thieves that uses what the film calls an “inform and rob” strategy. They give the cops clues in the form of games – both video games like Temple Run and traditional games like Snakes and Ladders. It’s a clever premise, but before we get to this part, we have to go through an endless stretch in a bus, where Mega Star Mammootty is used as a framing device. Yes, Bazooka takes one of the greatest star presences of our time and turns him into a narrator, whose job is to lay out the film’s cops-and-robbers structure.
Given the twist, this is technically not a bad thing, because – in theory – it makes us wait for a big reveal involving this character. After all, this film is more in the Turbo zone than the Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam zone, with non-stop slow-motion scenes practically being written into Mammootty’s contract. But the way the screenplay is written, the film seems to be delaying getting to the point, just so that we can spend a lot of time worshipping the handsome star. The result is a series of scenes that appear disconnected, with over-stylised and random action blocks, where the Mammootty character packs off biker gangs and the likes. The man is introduced while reading a book titled “Game of Life”. This is that kind of movie. It wants us to think it has a brain, but what we sense mostly is a pounding background score that doesn’t let us use… our brains.
Like serial killers, director Deeno Dennis asks us to buy a concept called “serial robbers”. But the compulsion to kill is much rarer than the compulsion to steal. Is there a criminal in the history of crime who robbed just once and retired? If thieving is your job, isn’t it obvious that you are going to keep doing it? What am I, then? A “serial film critic”? Bazooka never makes us feel that these gamer-criminals are a serious menace that need to be caught, and that becomes a major issue. Who wants a crime thriller that doesn’t make us care about the crimes in the first place? If the climax appears a little better, it’s because the rest of the film is so dull – and not because these final portions are especially inventive. Take away Mammootty’s undeniable stardom and what we have is a cautionary reminder of what Alfred Hitchock said: “To make a great film, you need three things – the script, the script, and the script.” That’s the real bazooka, and without it, you have a film with no ammo.
