Marvel and DC, and in extension Hollywood, have long dominated the realm of superheroes. With Minnal Murali, Basil Joseph has attempted to challenge the status quo. Does it stand up to the expectations the audience has been having since the quirky trailers came out?
Starring Tovino Thomas, Guru Somasundaram, Vasisht Umesh, Baiju Santhosh, Aju Varghese, and Femina George in pivotal roles, Minnal Murali follows Jaison, a small-town boy dreaming of a better life in the US. One night, he is struck by lightning. How Jaison discovers his newfound power and accepts it and his destiny forms the crux of the story.
Objectively speaking, Minnal Murali is your typical hero-formation story, complete with a character arc of the hero going from being reluctant to accepting his destiny as a hero. However, what sets this 159-minute movie apart as a home-grown superhero film is the innate "Mallu feel" of the movie.
Arun Anirudhan and Justin Mathew have found the right balance between a typical Malayalam story and a Superhero journey.
One thing that stands out in any Superhero film (read Marvel movies) is the score, which becomes the life of the movie. Sushin Shyam understood the assignment and created a fitting score for India's very own superhero, Minnal Murali.
The songs in the movie were composed by both Sushin Shyam and Shaan Rehman, which weren't as disruptive as you would have expected songs to be in a superhero movie.
Yet another aspect that makes Minnal Murali a superior superhero movie amongst the a few that the Indian audience were subjected to is its comic sequences. The part of the movie where our hero discovers his newfound powers and learns to adjust them is hilarious. Suffice to say, the writer duo got the humour element of a typical superhero movie just right.
Basil Joseph's experienced direction seeps through Minnal Murali. With believable VFX, which Joseph personally supervised, the movie is a slick entertainer. However, the movie could not avoid the sinkhole of unexplained character actions towards the fag end of the movie.