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Kaapa Movie Review : Interesting, if predictable, gangster movie

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Refrain from posting comments that are obscene, defamatory or inflammatory, and do not indulge in personal attacks, name calling or inciting hatred against any community. Help us delete comments that do not follow these guidelines by marking them offensive . Let's work together to keep the conversation civil.

Suresh babu 630 days ago

Good ��

Divya Nambiar 649 days ago

Waste of time

Wings 650 days ago

Lousy movie....

Prabhakar GSC 651 days ago

Normally Malalayam movies are good and engaging . But this movie is a mediocre movie with poor script.

User venkatesh 653 days ago

Superb..��

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Home » Reviews » Malayalam Movie Reviews

Kaapa Movie Review: Prithviraj Sukumaran’s Unique Gangster Drama Is Brilliant In Flashbacks But Equally Predictable In Present

Kaapa is a very interesting and fresh landscape but falls prey to a predictable narrative.

Star Cast: Prithviraj Sukumaran, Asif Ali, Anna Ben, Dileesh Pothan, Aparna Balamurali, and ensemble.

Director: Shaji Kailas

What’s Good: There art of plotting multiple stories in the same landscape and interconnecting it to the main plot is visible and well executed.

What’s Bad: The same main plot that is serviced well from all directions ends up being predictable.

Loo Break: When Prithviraj folds his Mundu for beating the pulp out of goons for the zillionth time. You know he will come out of it without even a crease on his crisp white shirt by the second time.

Watch or Not?: It’s on OTT now and you can give it a try if you feel like it. No pressure!

Language: Malayalam (with subtitles).

Available on: Netflix

Runtime: 133 Minutes

A local Gangster in Thiruvananthapuram Madhu (Prithviraj) is triggered again when an enemy from the past knocks door again. A bag of worms is left wide open and a lot of blood needs to be shed to close it again.

Kaapa Movie Review: Script Analysis

Like Amitabh Bachchan in his era created a prototype Angry Young Man for himself with Salim-Javed , Prithviraj Sukumaran over the past couple of years has made a Man-Child wanting to rule everything with his arrogance and finding redemption most interestingly his prototype. The actor even manages to make it look different everytime, but does that really work when the plot he is given turns out predictable at the most crucial point?

Written by G.R. Indugopan, Kaapa, is a very solid premise. There are multiple interesting things. An eloped goon from a wanted list, a husband who has never even slapped anyone in his most bizarre dream trying to save his mysterious wife from a massive lethal syndicate, a gangster who is evil but somewhere has a human hidden inside him. And much more. There is so much to play with because it is not the staple placement of characters. There is a vulnerability in every corner of this landscape because someone is somebody’s weakness all the time. While the introductions are well sketched it all sums up the present part of the story that becomes highly predictable.

While the biggest weakness of the films that shuffle between present and past is the tone it misses while transitioning into the flashback most of the time, for Kaapa it is the reverse. The flashback sequences in Kaapa are so strong and unique that they raise your expectations from the story on many levels. There is politics, discrimination, the rise of a bad man, and a lot more where it feels like a perfect three-dimensional beautifully surrounded story. Every character has an arc where he gets his/her spotlight.

But turns out only the flashback gets the attention and not the present. The present is as predictable and formulaic as it can be. Every time problem rises, Kotta Madhu folds his Mundu and fights 50 guys single-handedly with his physics-defying punches and kicks without even a single weapon even touching him, forget any scratch or crease on his crisp white shirt. This is so been there seen that after a point that the perfect base set by the strong flashback becomes useless.

Also, why is so less of Anna Ben in the story? She is supposed to be the root cause of the entire saga but we never get to see how and why she eloped in the first place. We know she is innocent, but why is she running then? And why is she not letting her disguise down even once, even when alone?

Kaapa Movie Review: Star Performance

Prithviraj Sukumaran can cakewalk these parts now. The actor has found his niche and is experimenting with it. Though I want to see him experimenting more now, this performance is not bad.

Anna Ben deserves more than this and she doesn’t get much to showcase the calibre she has. Asif Ali on the other hand gets to show his range with a very merry role in hand. So does Aparna Balamurali who flips her entire arc with the amazing climax.

Kaapa Movie Review: Direction, Music

Shaji Kailas as the director is very convinced that Prithviraj indulged in hand-to-hand combat draws audience and he puts a lot of it into the movie. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t got the spark. The flashback scenes have all the spark that a good filmmaker can create.

The music and camera are average and don’t experiment much.

Kaapa Movie Review: The Last Word

Kaapa is a very interesting and fresh landscape but falls prey to a predictable narrative. Watch it for the love of Prithviraj Sukumaran and his Mundu.

Kaapa Trailer

Kaapa releases on 22 December, 2022.

Share with us your experience of watching Kaapa.

For more, read our Malikappuram Movie Review here.

Must Read: Varisu Movie Review: The Problem Isn’t Vijay Being The Best Thing About This Film, Problem Is He’s The Only Good Thing!

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Kaapa Movie Review: Shaji Kailas's gangster drama is a gritty, faithful adaptation

Rating: ( 3.5 / 5).

One of the reasons I'm enamoured by the work of GR Indugopan is the vividness he brings to his scenarios. His stories carry the smell and flavour of the cities where they take place. His characters possess distinct personalities, and the local dialect flows through the pages like poetry. The lightning-fast pacing of his narratives makes it difficult for me to take continuous pauses. I always try to finish them in one sitting. 

Director: Shaji Kailas

Cast: Prithviraj Sukumaran, Aparna Balamurali, Asif Ali, Anna Ben

It's been a while since I've read Indugopan's Thiruvananthapuram-set novella Shankumukhi , but the principal characters and events were still fresh in my mind before I set out to the theatre. I wasn't too skeptical about Shaji Kailas directing it, given his experience with a gritty, extremely violent gangster drama in 1997 called Asuravamsham . It's a rarity in his filmography. I was a kid back then, and I remember being disturbed by some of the gory portions in it that grown-ups would more easily digest. But this was a phase where I was familiar with almost the entire filmography of Shaji Kailas. For someone who had at that point only seen the more massy films of the director, something like Asurvavamsham, which differed strongly in tone from his other films, was unexpected. So did Shaji Kailas deliver with Kaapa ? That would be a yes!

Here's the thing. For me, it was more important to see the film do justice to Indugopan's story than become an acting exercise. Kaapa is not, after all, trying to be The Godfather or Goodfellas . It's determinedly a commercial entertainer -- the movie more than the book, I would say. It closely follows the source material's plot structure, including the final twists. Of course, we expect some minor 'massy' embellishments, considering this is a big theatrical release fronted by a superstar, Prithviraj, accompanied by three other top names from Malayalam cinema in the lead roles. 

But at its core lies the same spirit we found in the notable Ram Gopal Varma films like Satya , Company , Sarkar , or the Vishal Bhardwaj gangster dramas. I'm not saying Kaapa is on par with those films in finesse and craftsmanship. But it's a fairly enjoyable crime adventure thanks to Prithviraj doing full justice to the character, Kotta Madhu, whose physical description differs from the one in the book. But does that really matter when the actor gets the character's essence right? 

A ferocious and headstrong character, Kotta Madhu deserved an actor of Prithviraj's stature. Madhu is an imposing man who navigates Indugopan's story with the Damocles's Sword hanging over him every second and minute. He knows what his sins are. You get the sense that he would've done things differently had he been given a chance to live his life differently for the second time. And he comes across as someone willing to accept any punishment for his past transgressions. 

This is how Prithviraj plays Kotta Madhu in the film too, and it gets most of my brownie points for getting this portrayal right. He plays him as a man with a tough exterior but tormented by an event that made him the dreaded don that he is today. And we get a brief flashback of this, staged in the film exactly how I imagined it while reading it. It's one of the film's rare emotional high points but done without resorting to melodrama, and one whose after-effects are strongly felt in the present.

As I said earlier, Shaji Kailas and cinematographer Jomon T John stay true to Indugopan's vision. They get the sombre mood of the book right, except, of course, for instances where we get the classic Shaji Kailas moments, some that seem cliched due to our encounter with similar moments in movies we have seen before. Others are welcome because today, we rarely get the massy slo-mo fights or assertive war cries. Like Asuravamsham , it is a Shaji Kailas movie that doesn't look like a Shaji Kailas movie. 

That said, I would've loved to see some nuance exercised in the dialogue delivery, particularly with regard to the khaki-clad supporting cast members, who sound like characters from the weaker movies of Shaji Kailas. These are the areas where the film's energy dips, and I wish the makers invested more time to give us something we have not seen before. Remember the shady cop played by Indrans in Malik? How chilling he was in that! I hoped for a similar directing choice here. Also, when there are names like Aparna Balamurali and Anna Ben, you expect them to do more than what we got in Kaapa . A potential sequel might bring in better things: Kaapa ends with the hint of one while not exactly announcing it.

Dileesh Pothan offers no surprises as Latheef, a newspaperman with his own agenda, and Kotta Madhu's rival. However, being the skilled performer he is, Dileesh is admirably effective at selling us Latheef's intentions. He is not the "villain" of this story. In fact, none of the characters in Kaapa can be called black or white. Grey is the dominant colour. There is someone I would call "idealistic," and that's Asif Ali's Anand, a role that the actor pulls off with considerable ease. 

If Kaapa is supposed to be a poignant meditation on lives altered by violent events, it doesn't quite succeed in stirring our emotions on a deeper level. But, as a cinematic portrait of a way of life, it does. Some express regrets, but there is no going back from a life of crime. Some bravely forge ahead, trapped forever in the cyclical pattern of violence. 

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Kaapa Review: This Gangster Drama Entertains With Swagger, But Not So Much With Substance

Director : Shaji Kailas

Cast : Prithviraj Sukumaran , Asif Ali , Aparna Balamurali , Anna Ben

We are introduced to the world of Kaapa through Binu Thrivikraman (Anna Ben) and Anand (Asif Ali). When Anand learns that Binu’s name is found on the fugitives list based on Kerala Anti-Social Activities (Prevention) Act (KAAPA), he tries his best to remove his naive wife’s name with the help of a police officer.  

But in the process, he learns about Binu’s past, her brother’s murder, the gangs of Trivandrum, and the ruling king Kotta Madhu (Prithviraj Sukumaran) and his wife Prameela (Aparna Balamurali). Caught in the world of gangsters, Anand gives the viewers a third-person's perspective of the gritty world, as he struggles to navigate it. However, this exciting premise acts as a ramped-up introduction to Madhu and takes backstage as the film progresses. 

GR Indugopan, who has based the film on his story Shanghumukhi , creates a world of revenge between two gangs — of Kotta Madhu and the army of Dileesh Pothan’s Latheef. But like in Shaji Kailas and Prithviraj Sukumaran’s previous collaboration Kaduva , there is a larger focus on the fight sequences and how.

From the first fight of Madhu, the swagger of slo-mo and close-up shots amplify the hits. Jomon T. John's camera makes these sequences teem with aesthetics. For instance, when a young Madhu fights off a gang in a hotel — the food splatters all over, and the plates break — Jomon freezes a close-up of Prithviraj after he punches a rowdy, and the tea droplets mimic fire flames. However redundant and repetitive some fight scenes are, they are entertaining to watch. 

Having said that, there are certain gory visuals you should brace yourselves to witness. For those who have watched the trailer, you would have seen a man without a head. And that’s a sample of the bloodshed that is to come in the film. For context, the beheaded man in the trailer was once the reigning gangster of Trivandrum, before his head was blasted into pieces. 

In a world of gangsters, Anand is always the most clueless, not knowing whom to approach and whose side to take. And like Anand, Kaapa finds itself losing focus at times. On the surface, Prithviraj’s Kotta Madhu is a grey character. He is a gang leader who has reached the place by multiple murders and using the innocent. But the film mostly worships him, and the main story gradually becomes that of Madhu than Trivandram’s intriguing gangster world. He is shown as the flawed and vulnerable gangster that he is. And you also find yourself empathising with Madhu, even if Latheef and gang have a well-balanced backstory backing their thirst for revenge. 

Latheef tries to murder Madhu many times, but as you can guess, Madhu manages to win even without a small scratch. Come to think of it, there is not even a real gang that works against Madhu. So, you do not feel a real threat to his life, and this is when the film becomes predictable. 

While the film could have been so much more, what balances out its flaws are the emotions driving the characters. We do not see much of their lives apart from them killing many unnamed rowdies and spewing punch dialogues. But the little emotions and slight vulnerabilities they show help us relate to the characters. It is a complete Prithviraj Sukumaran show, but Dileesh Pothan as Latheef and Jagadish Kumar as Jabbar Ikka (Madhu’s right hand) own this world. From supporting his wife’s choice for pregnancy to going to extreme lengths to save her, Asif Ali gets to play one of the better etched characters in the film.

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Review | Shaji Kailas-Prithvi combo’s 'Kaapa' scripts a capital act

The Kaapa Act was introduced in Kerala to rein in bloody gang wars that once rocked the state, especially the capital city. And to an extent, it has been effective at keeping gang rivalries at bay.

What the Act has achieved over the years, however, does not form the context of Shaji Kailas's latest outing 'Kaapa', unlike the title. Rather, the Prithviraj-starrer's focus is giving you a taste of the dreaded criminals ruling the alleys of the city and the bitter rivalries.

Gangster movies like these may not be new to Malayalis, but the director has managed to invoke our curiosity with unconventional twists.

Kaduva review: Action is the hero in this Shaji Kailas-Prithviraj drama

Release of Prithviraj starrer 'Kaduva' postponed to July 7

The credit goes to G R Indugopan's script as the movie is largely based on his novella 'Shankhumukhi'.

Indugopan does not hold back dialogues laced with Thiruvananthapuram slang and peppered with curse words, but he has to be credited for keeping it neat, despite the foul language.

Kotta Madhu, played by Prithviraj, gains control of the streets of Thiruvananthapuram by murdering another gang leader. But his actions haunt him even after he lords over the gangsters in the city.

Meanwhile, Anand (Asif Ali) is trying to clear his wife Binu ( played by Anna Ben) from the Kaapa list, though she is unaware that her name figures in it.

This triggers an interesting twist. The action is mass though a bit tiresome, but what else can you expect from a film that revolves around gang wars? The scenes can also get gory at times, something that you need to keep in mind before heading to theatres.

This is easily Prithviraj's best action thriller this year, and he has nailed his act much better in 'Kaapa' than he did in 'Kaduva'. It has definitely been an interesting year for Prithviraj, who donned several roles across genres this year. Though his critics may deem him unfit to play comical or sentimental roles, he shines in delivering mass movies. His first film with Shaji Kailas, 'Simhasanam', may not have created magic in the box office, but the collaboration seems to be aging well, like fine wine.

Shaji Kailas seems to be getting a better grip of how modern mass entertainers work. In the 1990s, the director had won laurels as a commercial filmmaker, but, somehow that magic faded in the 2000s. Even his most recent work 'Kaduva' had remnants from the 1990s.

If Shaji Kailas's earlier work 'Kaduva' was just a mass entertainer, 'Kaapa' is a step ahead, both in terms of the story and emotion. The storyline gets predictable in the second half but the emotions and motives are compelling.

The female characters have enough space to perform and have broken some of the shackles of misogyny, which had marred Kaduva in many ways.

Jagadish is breaking free from comical roles like his counterparts Suraj and Indrans and has landed a meaty role to prove his calibre after Leela.

His Thiruvananthapuram dialect is spot on, though this is not the case with most characters in the film.

Overall, it is clear the Shaji Kailas- Prithviraj combo has worked, thanks to Indugopan’s crafty script writing.

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