Janaki V Vs State Of Kerala Review: Suresh Gopi's Legal Drama Falters With Inconsistency
Janaki V Vs State Of Kerala fails to deliver shock value and drama. Suresh Gopi's larger-than-life persona clashes with the realistic setting, resulting in a convoluted screenplay.
Janaki V Vs State Of Kerala movie review out.
Janaki V Vs State Of Kerala Movie Review: Abel Donovan (Suresh Gopi) asks the victim of a brutal sexual assault, Janaki V (Anupama Parameswaran), 'Do you watch porn?" Almost everyone in the court and in the theatre is supposed to be shocked by that question, which seems to be the point of it. The idea here is to invoke a similar dramatic intrigue as in a scene from Pink, where Deepak Sehgal (Amitabh Bachchan) asks Minal Arora, 'Are you a virgin?" The question in Pink is justified, as Deepak intends to bring about the irrelevance of it in the context of consent. However, here the scene is exactly for all the wrong reasons.
Debutant director Pravin Narayanath, who has also written the film, has intended to create an enigmatic protagonist and a sense of shock value by having a protagonist saving the wrong person in Janaki V Vs State Of Kerala. To put it more precisely, David Abel Donovan is the Devil's advocate, literally! While it sounds like a brilliant idea, the film fails to bring it to fruition.
As far as the story goes, Janaki V vs State of Kerala is about an IT employee from Bengaluru who gets sexually assaulted by an unknown criminal during her visit to her hometown in Kerala. Since the victim was unconscious during the assault, the investigation turns out to be hard. Meanwhile, Janaki is found to be pregnant and she starts her crusade to live her life with dignity and seeks justice. Now, it doesn't become clear what the intention of the film is until the very end.
One expects it to be an investigative thriller about nabbing the real culprit of the crime. But the film quickly finds a generic answer to it, and it moves on to another problem about abortion, which never was set up to be a conflict in the first place. The convoluted story has led to a patchy screenplay, and in the end, it leaves you wondering if Pravin Narayanath made the film he set out to make.
The biggest problem of the film is Suresh Gopi. While the actor is effective in his performance and his trademark heroism, the problem is that his larger-than-life persona is incongruous with the realistic setting of the film. Before the film gets into the actual conflict, it meanders around another case of David Abel Donovan taking on the Church to bring a man of faith to justice. This and many other portions of the film that involve Suresh Gopi spitting fiery dialogues about government, women empowerment, corruption, and more don't really sit well with the rest of the movie. We also have a fight sequence that sticks out as a sore thumb in an otherwise sober movie.
The film also reminded us of Rajinikanth's Vettaiyan, which pretty much has a similar arc of a well-intentioned man of action committing a blunder and fixing it. Both Janaki V vs State of Kerala and Vettaiyan suffer from the same problem of having a superstar for the protagonist when the script only demands an actor who can be flawed. Since Suresh Gopi cannot be fallible, the film ends up being a generic and illogical legal drama, which gives room for the hero to deliver monologues in a courtroom where he is neither a prosecutor nor the defender.
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