Turbo First Day First Impression: This Mammootty Film Is Quite Fun When It’s Charged With Humour, Not Action

Director: Vysakh

Writer: Midhun Manuel Thomas

Cast: Mammootty, Raj B Shetty, Sunil, Anjana Jayasurya, Bindu Panicker

Duration: 162 mins

Available in: Theatres

• When the film begins with a grotesque double-murder in Chennai during Diwali time, and we’re immediately flicked away to the idyllic Idukki during a church festival, where the hero Josekutty (Mammootty) makes an entry, the transition leaves one wondering about all the hoops the film is going to conveniently jump through to connect these two distant worlds. That is perhaps one of the most impressive things about Vysakh’s Turbo. As mindlessly over-the-top it may seem with its theatrics, its neat writing keeps a tight leash on the checks and balances. So, we get from point A to B, with the detailing of a well-fleshed drama, and not an empty entertainer.  

• Jose or Turbo Jose is not a tough nut to crack. He is a big ol’ softie who pulls out the big guns anytime someone messes with his loved ones. But the film goes one petite step further and gives his fate some character. Jose doesn’t go looking for trouble like your usual flashy, know-it-all big guy. Trouble quite literally follows him. This leaves way for some good-intentioned jest. When his friend is thrashed for planning to elope with his girlfriend, Jose is needled to engage in a big fight and bring the girl. Even if it hilariously backfires. Sometimes it’s the lack of water in a lodge that promised unlimited hot water and sometimes it’s a decent-looking boss (Dileesh Pothan in a fun cameo) who inadvertently comes with trouble. Jose’s run-ins with distress are fun little distractions.

• The camera and the highly coloured action sequences are at best kind to Mammootty, who tries his best to buy into Turbo’s obsession for brawls— as unnecessary as they may often be. Whether his footwork makes us forget his age or not, his humour most certainly does because as smooth-talking as Jose is, he’s also a mama’s boy, who cannot sleep without his mother in the same house. His exchanges with his Ammachi (Bindu Panicker) are mostly delightful, and this chemistry is perhaps almost enough to make us overlook the fact that Mammootty is much older than Panicker. 

• But halfway through the film, one wonders if these portions would’ve worked with anyone else but stars of such calibre. Turbo tries to fill some of its glaring loopholes with the power of its performers. Jose’s clinginess to his mother, and the lack of any romantic relationships in life — an otherwise accentuated component of any commercial mass movie — is explained in a tiny flashback narration, and for that we’re thankful. It’s also smart that the film doesn’t de-age Mammootty physically or metaphorically, saving itself from falling into a cesspool of cringiness.

• The first half of the film is almost the perfect blend of mystery and mayhem. We’re introduced to Vetrivel Shanmuga Sundaram — there’s a reason why this author felt forced to spell out his full name — an underground kingpin, who has his hands in many illegal baskets in Chennai city, the biggest of them being a bank scam to help politicians. Jerry (Shabareesh Varma), Jose’s friend, is bent on airing out his dirty linen to the public, and inevitably enlists the help of his former girlfriend Indulekha (Anjana Jayasurya) and Jose. We go from a comedy of errors to an investigative track, which partly works because of its pace.

• But this is also where Turbo gets undone. The film breaks for intermission at a dramatic juncture, a place from which it struggles to recover. Raj B Shetty is commanding as the villain who grinds all of his naysayers into a paste along with all the other dry fish in his fish factory (no, we aren’t embellishing for effect) . But again, most of the respect and fear that the character commands is probably a result of Shetty’s finesse as an actor and not really the writing. We know nothing about him apart from the fact that he is put off by clichés and anything that isn’t a pair of black-and-black shirt and dhoti. 

• Character is sometimes all that distinguishes a massy no-brainer entertainer, and once Turbo loses its personality, it obviously isn’t fun anymore. People sort of drop dead all of a sudden, and it all comes down to Jose to save people with his brawn. “This is not a petty village feud anymore. Let’s leave,” Jose says at one point. But it’s sadly not that kind of film. The hits keep coming, and Jose just keeps getting better at it, and it increasingly becomes difficult to care what happens to these characters after a point. While we see a lot of Anjana in the film — Indulekha is pivotal to the film’s macguffin just as Jose is — Turbo doesn’t have time to really get into what makes her tick. 

• Care is taken to see to it that no single character in the film is announced without any motive. From a scorned rank officer to a garish rowdy (Sunil in a cameo as Auto Billa), Jose forms his own line of Avengers to run to his aid. “You know what differentiates me from other guys?” Jose asks. “It’s that I don’t make enemies with anyone I fight.” Turbo is also a film that tries to go by its hero’s motto. It tries to infuse some freshness to the genre by subverting the image of the stoic mass hero. But we only wish it went several notches higher.