The action entertainer Marco is a well shot, gnarly bloodfest that packs some lackluster thrills, notes Arjun Menon.
Another day, another lesser effective wannabe 'Pan Indian' action film is out to test your patience.
Marco is easily the most awaited event film from Malayalam cinema in recent times. Interestingly, the impetus for this pre-release hype is not directly proportional to the track record of the filmmaker or the lead actor but more a testament to the cravings of a younger film viewing demographic who revel in films promising new depths of onscreen depravity.
Marco is less of an action entertainer and more an aesthetically deprived blood fest that aims for the tightly contested spot of maximum body counts.
Haneef Adeni started his career with a similarly styled revenge thriller The Great Father, featuring Mammootty. Marco is cut from the same cloth that prioritises sleazy one liners, self important line readings and gorgeous high frame rate images, underlined with little to no thought or intent.
Marco continues the trend in more brutal ways, and is a derivative, clumsy revenge saga that is kept alive by the beating heart of Unni Mukundan's conviction in pulling of action set pieces.
The film starts with the death of the younger heir to a crime family headed by George (Siddique) and we get a peak into the machinations of an incoming gang war.
The hero arrives on screen, ripping apart two dogs (literally!) and soaked in dog blood emerging from a van, proclaiming proudly to the goons who kidnapped him, 'I am a dog lover myself. I have a husky, his name is Rocky' and goes on to slice an entire room full of ruffians.
We get the picture, mate.
The 'post KGF and Animal phenomena of the gun-wielding action hero is fast losing any sort of cultural capital, thanks to the umpteen tasteless imitators who fail to understand the core of what makes those films work.
Film-makers like Prashant Neel and Sandeep Reddy Vanga have taught contemporary directors the wrong lessons.
The up and coming generation of wannabe, hip action film-makers adopt the easy thrills, without offering the most foundational aspect that makes their work tick: Emotional grounding.
All the action, gore and bloodshed in the world won't make a difference to the audiences, if you don't give them that emotional catharsis that holds the most bizarre of screenwriting choices in solid grounding.
For instance, in Animal, the dramatic tension is borne out of the complicated relationship between Ranvijay Singh and his scarcely attentive father. There are real stakes for the hero to prove himself, and go about his murderous rampage to get back at the people who wronged his family.
Marco, on the other hand, with a similar setup of a step brother out to take revenge for the death of his sibling is treated as a mere exercise in style. It is not interested in the psychology of what breeds the sort of fury that could drive the hero down such a hell ride.
The quirky, unpredictable nature of the protagonist is limited to awkward exposition delivered by kids in the family intercut with Marco delivering stale one-liners.
Unni Mukundan gives the film his all and it's his committed presence and agile physicality that elevates some poorly plotted action pieces.
Chandru Selvaraj's camera is always on the lookout for a glossy, exuberant image but the over crowded, mundane writing and pacing holds back the tonal shifts in his work.
Ravi Basrur could have scored this film in his sleep. But the occasional insert of the catchy theme music does inject some life into the proceedings.
Jagadeesh gets the next best stylised character but there is a jarring dissonance between his ticks in character and his acting style.
Siddique gets to do nothing except for an action block in the finale that doesn't add much.
The female characters are sorry figures and outliers in Haneef Adeni's vision for Marco, so they become the symbol of domesticity and civil society, as the men go out and wreck havoc.
There is a scene where his lover confesses to Marco, that she saw him as a 'red flag' and 'toxic' individual from the very onset. The bizarre sequence tells you how much the film wants to posture itself as a piece of self aware exercise in indulgence.
Marco is the latest in a long list of films that make the horrendous mistake of foregrounding the aesthetics of 'hyper violence' as a means to an end. The end being, wrongful, distasteful distraction from a premise that would crumble without the pretension of gnarly bloodshed.
Midway through Marco, there is an action set piece, reminiscent of the 'stair wall' action piece from the last instalment of the John Wick franchise. There is thought and serious effort put into the one shot conception of the action, which sees our hero punching, cutting and piercing through rows of masked men on a never-ending flight of stairs with the aim of reaching a captive.
However, the hand held, messy camerawork and staging of the visceral fight sequence is undercut by an abrupt revelation that undermines the purpose of the scene and cuts a sorry figure of the hero with a quick cutaway to a scene that shows him doing the very thing that he was holding back from doing in the previous shot, in an entirely new setting.
It's this kind of careless scene construction, where shock value is prioritised over narrative cogency that makes Marco such a dull gore fest without any visceral payoffs for the amount of onscreen debauchery that the film-makers indulge in.
Marco is definitely not a total bummer as the action choreography keeps it afloat.
There is no denying the amount of work and effort that goes into pulling off these grimy, nauseatingly depraved ways to kill and injure characters on screen.
The bloodbath in the finale and the relentless body count just numbs you and you wait for the shoe to drop, which just doesn't happen.
