Daily Times

Directed by B Unnikrishnan and written by Udaykrishna, Christopher, seems to be inspired from Kamal Haasan’s recent Vikram and Hollywood’s The Equalizer franchise, where a cop becomes a vigilante and delivers justice by taking the law into his own hands. Mammootty, starring as Christopher Anthony in this film, is a cop vigilante too, with a specific purpose of delivering justice to women in society. We also meet Sitaram Trimurthi (Vinay Rai), who ends up becoming Christopher’s arch nemesis and, in fact, this is how the film starts.

Senior IPS official Christopher is suspended due to several encounter killings and fellow police officer ACP Sulekha (Amala Paul) is asked to conduct an investigation by the Kerala Chief Minister (Siddique) and Home Secretary Beena Mariam (Sneha). As Sulekha starts to investigate Christopher, we discover the biography of this vigilante cop, which is also the tagline of the film. Though society is with Christopher and believes he has delivered justice to those women who were brutally raped and murdered, is that right? Is Christopher justified in these encounter killings or is he a murderer? What is the motivation behind these encounter killings?

B Unnikrishnan and Udaykrishna seem to lack creativity as far as this story is concerned and while it is touted as an action thriller, it is not. The story of this film is not new to Indian cinema or even Malayalam cinema. The story of vigilante cop Christopher is similar to any other – the protagonist goes through severe emotional trauma as a child due to a horrendous event and this manifests in a different form as he grows older. The vigilante hero takes the law into his own hands, but he is a do-gooder rather than a destructive force in society. And society in turn celebrates whatever the vigilante hero does and doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong, because they see the police as being inefficient and corrupt.

The story just unfolds itself pretty much in the first half an hour and becomes very predictable. There is no hook to engage the audience nor any twist and turn that leaves us surprised. The villain also doesn’t offer anything to the viewer and is quite cliched.

When Malayalam star Mammootty is part of a film, one expects fireworks in terms of the screenplay, the performances and story. This role was a cakewalk for Mammootty because he had a stoic expression throughout the film – except in one scene where he shed a few tears. He didn’t have to really put on his acting hat for this role, since there was hardly anything for him to do except be stylish, swagger around and shoot some guys. It is disappointing that a performer of his caliber and talent has been wasted in such a flat role.

As for the other actors, there are so many well-known ones in this film, including Vinay Rai, Amala Paul, Sneha, Siddique, Asihwarya Lekshmi, Sarath Kumar, Shine Tom Chacko and Dileep Pothan. Many of them have pretty insignificant roles except for Amala Paul and Sneha, to an extent. Vinay Rai made his debut in Malayalam with his film and one hopes he doesn’t end up getting stereotyped as the baddie in future Malayalam films, as he has in Tamil cinema.

The BGM by Justin Varghese gets too jarring at times and it seems to revolve around elevating Mammootty’s star image every time he comes on screen. Cinematographer Faiz Siddiq’s visuals are OK, as is the editing. Had the script been better and the movie’s run time shorter, Christopher would have been far more entertaining.