Priyadarshan's Oppam had a runtime of 2 hours and 23 minutes. Priyadarshan's Haiwaan, a remake of Oppam, has a runtime of 2 hours and 42 minutes. What extra material has the director added? To be honest, the so-called additions are minor and insignificant. On the narrative level, they don't alter the remake enough to set it apart from the original. If you have watched Oppam, you can skip Haiwaan, since it offers no new surprises. The jokes, the scenes, and even the plot twist remain largely intact. Priyadarshan has merely thrown new paint on an old wall, and it must be said that he is no good painter. For this utterly unnecessary remake, the director gets the casting wrong, the tone wrong, the dialogues wrong, and some of his choices are so baffling—like a cameo at the end that gives rise to a Ram-Shyam line so "sweet" that you feel like puking in the theater—that you wonder how the hell he made everyone agree to his decisions. Perhaps that's the only "commendable" thing Priyadarshan achieves with Haiwaan: he sinks the whole ship without intervention from his crew members. That's the problem with working with all these "yes sir" people. Tell them you are going to jump from the terrace to see if you can defeat gravity, and they will enthusiastically cheer you on as if you have come up with a genius plan.
If Haiwaan is, um, interesting in any way, it's as a case study that leads you to ponder: "How can the same person adapt the same story and produce two widely different outcomes?" Oppam, by any stretch, was not a Great Film, but it involved you in the daily lives of the city's residents with its pleasing, natural rhythms, while the thriller portions involving Samuthirakani got to you and made you all tense. The slow reveal of this actor's identity also added considerably to the experience, infusing the movie with a nice sense of suspense. By contrast, in Haiwaan, everything is out in the open. We know Akshay Kumar's Parshuram Gokhale is the villain, and if you have watched Oppam, no twist will leave your mouth open. Couldn't Priyadarshan, along with his co-writers Rohan Shankar and Abilash Nair, have cooked up new situations and fresh surprises for the remake? Then again, I don't think anyone who hasn't seen Oppam will end up enjoying Haiwaan either. It doesn't work particularly well as a standalone thriller, and it certainly doesn't offer anything worthwhile to viewers familiar with the original.
Because Haiwaan's flaws are fundamental: its very roots are damaged. Movies are an audiovisual medium, and to do justice to both sound and images, a filmmaker must have an aesthetic sensibility. The Priyadarshan of Oppam respected sound and images enough to use them in tandem to create a nervously exciting thriller. One could admire the repetitive rhythm with which Priyadarshan displayed a nun working through her chores, producing a false sense of security so that the shot of Samuthirakani in the nun's clothes could yield both surprise and a giddy type of terror. The same sequence here is shot like a chore that must be completed in a particular order. And that's a criticism you can extend to everything in Haiwaan: it has a mechanical momentum that, above all, reeks of disrespect for the cinematic medium. The movie is the very epitome of a hack job. It's made with the sole intention of raking in moolah at the box office, which is why it not only insults the audience but also shows contempt for them. Why else would Priyadarshan not bother doing something different with the remake?
Another major strength of Oppam—and perhaps the most essential to its success—was the presence of excellent actors. And it wasn't just big names like Samuthirakani and Mohanlal who carried the whole movie on their shoulders. Even someone like Vimala Raman, as a maid named Devayani, brought credibility to the story with her charming presence. When she flirted with Mohanlal's Jayaraman, she gave him a flirtatious smile, as if unleashing her subtle sensual powers to reel in the object of her desire. That maid character in Haiwaan is offered to Shriya Pilgaonkar, and she just doesn't fit into the role very well. Something feels wrong at a very deep level, though the issue lies not with Pilgaonkar as much as with the director for not paying enough attention to mining credible performances. It's hard to buy any of the actors in the roles they have been assigned. Every actor looks like an actor wearing a costume and makeup. The "acting" is very visible. It's Kumar, however, who calls so much attention to himself that he builds a wall between the screen and the audience. His hammy performance wants to be terrifying, but it goes beyond the boundary of "unintentionally hilarious." Simply put, I wanted to quote a famous Akshay Kumar line back to Akshay Kumar in the theater: "50 rupiya kaat overacting ka."
Nonetheless, the movie's title, which means "beast" in English, refers to Kumar's character, and given his awful theatricality here, I would say the title is being too generous. Kumar's Parshuram elicits giggles instead of consuming you with nightmares. I facepalmed quite a lot and found myself as disinterested in the movie as the cast and crew seem to have been while shooting the picture. The real haiwaan, then, I guess, is none other than Priyadarshan for making you suffer through 164 minutes of pure tedium. He generates a clumsy remake of his own work as if trying to say that Oppam was sort of an accident. Does he want to sabotage himself? Or is he testing how loyal his "Hera Pheri meme-sharing" fans are? There are other ways to test your fans—start by giving them respect. Someone could have enlightened Priyadarshan about this simple yet crucial piece of knowledge if he weren't surrounded by people who probably reply to everything he does with a "yes sir." There is perhaps another lesson in here about blindness, but I will leave it for you to dig that out. Go, connect the dots.
Final Score - [1/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times