India Region-free blu-ray
1080p Widescreen 2.35:1
Malayalam: Dolby TrueHD 5.1
Subtitles: English
MOVIE: 6.5
VIDEO QUALITY: 8.5
AUDIO QUALITY: 9
ENGLISH SUBTITLES: 7.5
EXTRAS: 0
Kerala Varma Pazhassiraja aka India’s Braveheart starring fat, hairy dudes!
I can understand the importance of this film for Malayalam cinema. I guess that part of India is not known for their films. So from that perspective, this is a good film for them. But…
But for the rest of the world, this is a very amateurish fair film. There is nothing wrong with the historical story. There is nothing wrong with the cinematography. There is nothing wrong with the music. Here comes the part that throws off the whole film:
1. The British actors (or actors pretending to be British) in this film which make up a good majority of the film are awful, awful, awful, awful actors. Bad bad bad bad. There is no excuse for such bad acting if the majority of the movie is going to include British actors. I wasn’t rooting for the evil British colonists to be killed because they were evil. I was rooting for them to be killed because I was waiting for them to get off the screen. But when one main British actor gets killed, he gets replaced with another bad British actor. Just plain awful. If the British acting would have been good or just neutral, the film could have been good. But in turn, it makes the film seem like an amateurish tv movie.
2. For anyone that has read online reviews and praises the action in this movie, it’s because they are Indian and they are just proud of any type of action choreography in their movies. The action is just plain bad, bad, bad, and bad. This movie has some of the worst laughable wirework that I have ever seen. And I like wirework. The actors are just nongracefully flung around like ragdolls. It looks totally amateurish and stupid. Furthermore, these fat warriors think they can just attach themselves to wires and do some Asian moves and think that they are all smooth and awesome looking. It wasn’t. It looks like these fat-ass warriors never did any type of training or physical activity in their lives. I don’t know who’s to blame but it’s a combination of the actors not caring, the director, and the fight choreographer. It was like watching fatties in a bloody version of a medieval live action role-playing game. There is only one actor in the movie that somewhat cared (you can tell that he lifted weights, unlike the other warriors who could care less how they looked). For anyone that even mentions this movie in the same realm as any Chinese martial arts film is truly retarded and can’t tell the difference between amateur fight choreography and professional fight choreography. The producers should have hired Sammo Hung (a well-known martial arts actor and fight choreographer who is heavy himself and knows how to make heavy people look suave in fight scenes).
3. The Indian acting is pretty good, but you just don’t feel for any of the characters – just not that gripping. People die, but you just don’t care. That’s the fault mainly with the screenplay.
Other than that, even though it’s an amateur B-movie, it’s certainly entertaining, not boring, and worth seeing what the big deal was for Malayalam cinema. The only direction to go from here is up. So they have to start somewhere. And since this is one of their most successful films, you got to give them credit for trying. Hopefully, they will correct some of the mistakes they made in this film in their future films.
The blu-ray is pretty good. After watching the whole film, I saw a bit more faults with it, such as white specs through out (not a big deal though) and the video quality was grainy and not as good during night scenes (once again, very common with many blu-rays). But for a Moserbaer blu-ray, this is a very impressive blu-ray since their DVDs are just plain awful. When you put the blu-ray in the player, it goes pretty much straight to the menu. The Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Malayalam rocks though – the sound was really good! Not one advertisement before the menu and no ads or logos popping up during the movie or songs. This is what a regular blu-ray is supposed to be like. And there is a song menu (just 3 songs). This company obviously did their blu-ray research! The English subtitles were okay. I don’t understand why Indians can’t get native English speakers to work on their subtitles. It will make the movie a lot better if the English subtitles make sense, don’t have spelling mistakes, and are grammatically correct! And there are no extras on the blu-ray.
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