‘Corona Papers’ movie review: Priyadarshan’s latest tryst with the thriller genre is an average affair – The Hindu

A service revolver, which fits lacking, is the start of every thing in Priyadarshan’s Corona Papers. Initially, it could appear to be a minor hiccup within the early days of service for rookie cop Rahul (Shane Nigam). However, quickly we realise that this revolver is the centrepiece of the script, being related to nearly each different vital incidence, together with a financial institution theft and some murders.

After the epic failure of Marakkar: Arabikadalinte Simham, Priyadarshan has chosen to do a straight thriller, sans any of the standard frills that one would affiliate together with his films. Identical to lots of his works in Hindi and Malayalam lately, the thought of Corona Papers too is borrowed from one other movie – the 2017 Tamil movie 8 Thottakal, written and directed by Sri Ganesh, who has been given writing credit on this film. The essential premise of the lacking revolver in that film was in flip borrowed from Akira Kurasowa’s Stray Canine.

Priyadarshan brings in a couple of beauty modifications to the script, particularly relating to the motivation for the killings, however principally sticks to the unique. Coming shut on the heels of Christopher, which celebrated extra-judicial killings, it was fairly a aid to observe a film which takes at the very least a mildly detrimental stand on the identical. However, a few of these sequences are weakly written.

From his common set of actors, solely Siddique stays within the solid, and because the suspended police officer Sankararaman, he will get a pivotal function. Corona Papers banks on a few of these characters, their backgrounds and motivations, to drive the plot alongside. For example, Sankararaman needs to get again on the cops who framed him in addition to make some cash to fund his spouse’s remedy, whereas Tony (Jean Paul Lal), needs to make some fast cash earlier than he runs away with Rani (Hannah Reji Koshy), the spouse of his gang chief Pappachan (Shine Tom Chacko). In the meantime, Gracy (Sandhya Shetty), a senior police officer, has a number of protecting as much as do.

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In direction of the top, there’s a little bit of philosophising too, with one of many characters, who has a couple of crimes behind him, speaking about how individuals are pressured to do sure acts by their circumstances. Though it does sound correct, particularly when delivered in an emotional voice with a background rating, each crime can be forgivable, by that logic. That little speech additionally evokes a police officer to forgive somebody who put him in a tough place by their somewhat egocentric actions.

There’s not a lot of a reveal ready for us on the climax, for the principal gamers concerned are all revealed to us early on. The one anticipation is in how that net is untangled, which is pulled off decently effectively. Regardless of its glitches, together with some horrible dubbing, Corona Papers stays a mean thriller as a result of energy of its script.

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