Varun Live

From my experience, I have learnt the fact that Movie making should never be a race against time. A typical example of what could go wrong when a movie becomes a race, is Prashant Maambulli’s 17 hour wonder, Bhagavan. The movie is centered on a terrorist attack in a hospital when Dr. Balagopal (Mohanlal) risks his life to save the day.

Analysis

It is after a long time that I am seeing Mohanlal so uncomfortable playing the lead character. He doesn’t seem interested and you cannot blame him as Bhagavan qualifies to be the worst movie in Mohanlal’s illustrous career. Direction by Prashant Maambulli is bad. I still can’t understand what was the need to complete the movie in 17 hours (though the movie wouldn’t have been any better even if it had been shot in 6 months).

The entire concept is ridiculous. For a movie to work with the audience, the soul of the movie (the script) should be good. But, in this case, the script (if ever there was one) and the story is silly with a childish screenplay. The manner in which most of the scenes are treated are silly and unexcusable. Be it the childish manner in which the commando units diffusing the bombs is portrayed or the closeups shown again and again, the movie throws at you a string of unthinkably ridiculous scenes. The dialogues are miserable and the word Bhagavan props up in Mohanlal’s dialogues every 100 words.

The director has wasted talented artists like Mohanlal, Lakshmi Gopalaswamy. The film is dumb and drags on and on paying no repsect whatsoever to the audience. Every 15 minutes you see some type of countdown from 10 to 0 on sceen and occasionally when the time of events in the movie are shown, it is then you realised you have been sitting through this movie only for about a few minutes. The movie fails on all technical grounds. The music of the movie is uninspiring.

When young directors like Ranjith Shankar and Swathy Bhaskar have given us refreshingly different movies, Prashant Maambulli gives us one of the most unbearable movies ever. At a run time of a little under two hours, Bhagavan is a bad excuse for a movie. Even ‘Bhagavan’ can’t save this movie.

Recomendation: Not even for your enemies. Stay far far away.

Rating: 1/5 (1 for completing it in 17 hours and for nothing else)