‘Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil': A comedy-Drama With An Exciting Storyline
The Vipin das movie Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil had couple of aspects that would invoke curiosity among the audience since its announcement and trailer release, one of it being the Prithviraj – Basil combination. The popular youth icon Prithviraj’s Najeeb in the last month’s release Aadujeevitham had raised the Malayalam movie to the international standards through the screenplay, direction, music, background score and the actor’s unbelievable transformation for materialising the protagonist. The ‘Anandettan’ in Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil portrayed by the actor demands performance in the other extreme pole, a character similar in mannerisms as his role in the commercial release ‘Bro daddy’ which is a mix of masculinity, roughness, humour and emotional sensitivity.
On the other hand, Basil enacting Vinu Ramachandran is a well-accepted and welcomed actor and director especially among the family audiences; Jaya Jaya Jaya He, Palthu Janvar , Minnal Murali etc being few among his contributions as actor as well as a director. Hence, Prithviraj and Basil as pillars leading a movie was obviously an unexpected and enthusiastic cast formula that the viewers were looking forward to explore through the movie, which has kind of worked fairly throughout the movie without testing the audience’s patience.
Second aspect being the genre of the movie itself, the approach that could be similar to a Rajasenan movie which, in fact, a risk factor in this era. The character roles by Biju and Jagadish added to that ninety’s and early 2000’s family movie recipe. The thread of the plot was new and interesting that could have been worked out better in terms of story, dialogues and humour. Recent trend of successfully integrating the old movie spoofs really worked with this comedy drama as well, especially the spoof from the Prithviraj’s debut movie Nandanam amidst the climax chaos was a good add on. The lady character roles handled by Nikhila and Anaswara were not given enough representation throughout the movie, as these female roles could have been bettered to contribute in par with the male lead roles. This could have strengthened the screenplay further. It’s a one-time watchable good family entertainer worth investing two hours.
