Mark Antony

This Antony is no orator!

By Ravi Shankar

Cast: Suresh Gopi, Divya Unni
Director: Suresh Babu
Script: Kaloor Dennis
Music: Beny Ignatius

This Mark Antony is no orator. Nor has he a fallen Caesar over whose body he can make fiery speeches. Truly, this is one film whose title matches the meaninglessness of the film itself.

Antony's fists are the only thinking organs functioning in his body, or so the director would have us believe. To add sauce to the fisticuffs stuff, Antony reveals at one point that he has a trademark form of assault up his sleeve called the Taliparambu style of Vettimalarthal. To the relief of the Kudippaka specialists (the red and the saffron orders) up north, he does not actually get down to exhibiting it.

There is one dead body though, of Papu, who is Antony's uncle and who is not worth a speech. A sharpshooter has shot him through his forehead from afar. His friend-turned-foe-turned-friend (it's true! I'm not joking!), aptly named Chakochan, and his henchmen are to be suspected. But then, the sniffer dogs pressed into service by a clueless police, for the first time in the history of sniffer dogs, sniff out from the chalk figure of the erstwhile corpse the spoor of the telescopic rifle used from hundreds of meters away. (These animal wonders deserve nothing less than a pat from Maneka Gandhi.) The rifle is found buried in the house of two henchmen of Chakochan and the needle of suspicion points back at him. He is now a friend-turned-foe-turned-friend-turned-foe.

Antony, back from Taliparambu, has two complications to handle in this otherwise simple plot. The first one is that Papu's daughter, his cousin, is in love with a Namboodiri. Horror of horrors! When Antony reaches that guy's house, he finds that the guy has just fixed his marriage with a girl from his own religion and caste and that too in this era of secularism! And just when we had settled down to the comforting thought that these mean Namboodiris had been made human beings by the likes of VT and EMS. Mark Antony senses here an opportunity to hone his oratory skills and, clearing his throat, succeeds in making a neat little speech. But, where does that place his cousin? Well, nowhere. As per the story, she is left high and dry and, probably, in search of a Christian, macho man.

The second complication is simpler. Nimmi, daughter of Chakochan, is in love with Antony. Well, he had a look up her skirt in their childhood and had badly punished himself for the offence (the darling) and in the present applauds her when she plays basketball (in a skirt, you idiot!). Enough reason to fall in love and enough reason why Chakochan is now a friend-turned-foe-turned-friend-turned-foe. Chakochan has the pro-establishment upper church on his side while Antony has the pro-love lower church with him. Their love (which did not take even five scenes to fructify and that too without a single love song) prevails, but we discover that Chakochan is not the actual murderer of the now-forgotten Papu. Hence, despite the love/marriage tangle, he is now a friend-turned-foe-turned-friend-turned-foe-turned-friend. Groan!

The rest is history. Just ten minutes of the film left and Mark Antony, employing his fists liberally, catches hold of the real culprit who is none other than Varkey, the elephant poacher, who had an axe to grind with both Papu and Chakochan and had planned to finish them both off. Unfortunately only Papu's unfortunate forehead came in the way of the cross mark of the telescope. True to fashion, Varkey's end comes in someone's factory manufacturing god-knows-what; we only know that each burst pipe emits some kind of gas which has no effect on human beings. Just when we shrink in horror at the sight of Mark Antony pointing his gun at Varkey (God! this young man will waste his good years behind bars), Varkey is gunned down by his second-in-command who in turn succumbs to a shot already fired by Varkey.

So, the world is cleansed off all evil and it's time for a final speech from Mark Antony. Before that, in one bound, you are out of the theatre. This film has many firsts to its credit. For one thing, it brings back that character called `the good Muslim' whom we had all forgotten. (In fact, the only song in the film is a Mappila song dedicated to this religious man). Muslims being otherwise villainous, it's no wonder that this Muslim character is played by an otherwise villainous Rajan P Dev. But, he is lost somewhere after the intermission and probably decided to join the PDP. Another first is the ESP exhibited by the sniffer dogs as mentioned above. The third one is that the Taliparambu Panchayat President can ring up our Chief Minister direct, and in his absence the DGP and demand help for her kinsmen. And the last, but not the least, is the reminder that Namboodiris are still Namboodiris.

Yes, we do have a cameraman called Salu George and an editor called Srikar Prasad. We also have Tyagarajan handling the stunts department and Beny Ignatius composing a single song. They are definitely part of the statistics.

Again, we do have a super star called Suresh Gopi as Mark Antony (starved of dialogues), Divya Unni as Nimmi (No! no basketball, please), Janardhanan as Janardhanan (oops! as Papu), Sreeraman as Sreeraman (sorry, as Chakochan) and KPAC Lalitha as Lalitha KPAC.

I forgot to mention, we do have a director called T S Suresh Babu who evidently did not dare go back to the scriptwriter called Kaloor Dennis to ask him very simple human questions. The producer could make a beginning, asking simple questions of the director. The viewers, of course, have no choice. They are in the same condition as the hero's cousin in the story is.

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