Avarachan and Sons movie review: Biju Menon’s Kumbalangi Nights wannabe misses the mark

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In the village of Chellanam, Avarachan (Biju Menon), a middle-aged widower, lives in a small house with his two sons, Jaison (Sreenath Bhasi) and Jaimon (Ganapathi S Poduval), and Jaison’s wife Keerthi (Akhila Bhargavan). While both his sons are responsible and work tirelessly to make a living, Avarachan is a loafer who misses no chance to stir up trouble while whiling away his days drinking and smoking.

Although he doesn’t have a warm relationship with Jaison and Jaimon, Avarachan is close to a pregnant Keerthi. One day, he gets embroiled in a fight, during which he severely injures a youngster. As he and his family run for their lives, more troubles start coming in search of them.

A strong premise lost in execution

Avarachan and Sons suffers from an absolute lack of substance in the script. Unintentionally, it highlights the importance of a solid screenplay and how badly a film can suffer without one, even with a decent plot and story. Although it subverts the age-old template of parents suffering because of irresponsible, impulsive children, and reverses the roles, the movie makes us feel throughout that all Thamby and his co-writer Joseph Vijeesh had was a fascinating plot and no clue how to turn it into a full-length film.

Avarachan and Sons simply moves from one half-cooked moment to the next, never managing to resonate with us or even do justice to its story. Even when a scene is meant to be emotional, the film fails to elicit the right response from us because the writers don’t extract the emotions properly.

For instance, there’s a sequence set in a rehabilitation centre, where Avarachan is lodged for a few days. During his stay there, his roommate suddenly dies, marking a turning point in Avarachan’s life that makes him rethink his lifestyle. However, this feels highly artificial, mainly since we don’t understand why the death of a random person he has just met would affect Avarachan more than seeing his own children suffer right in front of his eyes for years.

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The issue here is that Thamby and Joseph don’t adequately flesh out the soon-to-be-dead character or the bond he and Avarachan share. The movie shows him in one scene — without any proper introduction — offers a few more glimpses of him in the subsequent scenes, and then kills him off. Why should we (or even Avarachan, for that matter) feel for a character whom we barely knew? Such poor and unimpactful plot devices mar the film.

Unimpactful humour and insensitive plot devices

Another major shortcoming is that the humour rarely lands. While a few comebacks and one-liners may elicit a chuckle or two, there isn’t enough comedy in it to keep our undivided attention. Essentially, Avarachan and Sons is a comedy-drama with little to no impactful comedy or drama.

Meanwhile, the film sinks even further with an utterly pointless and ineffective subplot centred on Bincy (Grace Antony), a woman who lives next door to Avarachan’s sister, Eliyama (Pauly Valson). Despite their divorce, Bincy is frequently harassed by her ex-husband Ani (Vinay Forrt), who wants to remarry her. Their scenes even shamelessly turn stalking and acid attacks into a joke.

A major issue with Avarachan and Sons is that the humour in it rarely lands. (Credit: Facebook/@ListinStephenOnline)

Even if one were to assume that Thamby and Joseph were trying to achieve what Vipin Das did in Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya Hey (2022) — using dark humour to address sensitive topics — Avarachan and Sons’ script is so weak that it feels as if the movie is trying to trivialise crimes like stalking and acid attacks, reducing their heinous nature to mere punchlines.

Amid all this, the movie even introduces an undercooked age-gap romance that feels utterly weird.

Despite running for over 130 minutes, Avarachan and Sons never actually does justice to any of its characters. For instance, we initially see that Jaimon’s crush, Anita (Parvathy Babu), is uninterested in him. Even though she is open to an arranged marriage with him, she isn’t willing to actively pursue him if her family disapproves. But at one point, she suddenly shows interest in him, and the next time we see them, she is ready to elope with him. How did they even fall in love, let alone so madly? Even the writers seem to have no clue.

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Biju Menon holds ground, but others are underutilised

Although Biju Menon is solid as Avarachan — who is more or less a slightly grey-shaded version of his character Baiju from director Ranjan Pramod’s Rakshadhikari Baiju Oppu (2017) — he never elevates the character with his performance. He almost always sticks to the available material, which itself is weak to begin with.

Sreenath Bhasi, Ganapathi S Poduval, and Akhila Bhargavan are largely wasted in shockingly underwritten roles. Parvathy Babu’s performance as Anita is highly monotonous, as if she found an expression at the start and decided to hold on to it until the very end. Grace Antony is the only one who impresses in the comedy-drama with her performance.

Avarachan and Sons movie cast: Biju Menon, Sreenath Bhasi, Ganapathi S Poduval, Akhila Bhargavan
Avarachan and Sons movie director: Thamby
Avarachan and Sons movie rating: 1.5 stars