Salute Movie Review : A cold, detached character study in the guise of a crime procedural

Director: Roshan Andrrews 

Star Cast: Dulquer Salman, Diana Penty and Manoj K Jayan.

Salute is the latest entry to the never-ending reserve of the brooding, dark, introspective thriller staple from Malayalam cinema. The film is a conventional, excuse of a plot stretched far beyond its original promise. The film marks the returning collaboration between writers Bobby and Sanjay and Roshan Andrews after a string of successful titles to their credit, falls short of glory in its storytelling by some measure. It seems almost ironical that Dulquer who was last seen playing a cunning criminal mastermind in his previous release, the blockbuster Kurup, is seen here as a soft spoken, cerebral cop on the lookout for redemption from a past crime riddled with guilt. Salute is the kind of thriller that expects its viewers to comply well with the held back structure of its screenplay that never takes off fully outside of a few flourishes, written in more in the vein of convenient afterthought derived from an exciting central idea.

The film forgoes the pulsating pump of a well-designed mainstream crime thriller for the narrative mood of an indie procedural, and ends being a middling outing that does not manage to become, either in the process. The characters blurt out relevant exposition with the intentional formality of a well formulated police report and  the writing never bothers to humanize the leading man, Sub Inspector Aravind Karunakaran (Dulquer Salman) returning from a five-year hiatus from police service to track down the ghosts that led to a gloomy career break. This lack of character work makes Aravind, a mere template cop, seen in umpteen television procedurals and genre flicks from the past. The protagonist gets showed away among the umpteen nameless faces that try to make sense of a strange set of events, but we never feel his urge to do certain things in certain ways.

Ajith Karunakaran (Manoj K Jayan) gets a stock supporting part that never rises above the basic writing though the actor’s seasoned turn does lend some credibility to non -existent tension in the screenplay in his confrontation scenes with the hero, on the lookout for an undesired truth from the past. The intimate scenes are staged with the very same detachment that underlines each other curve ball like events that chart the narrative journey. It’s a slog to sit through the runtime without turning away from the screen from time to time, hoping for a plausible plot turn that might reverse the damp, cold weightlessness of the whole genre exercise. The actors look a tad too disinterested and seems like slogging their way through a few familiar beats that never rises above its innate design to reward us with a worthwhile payoff or pleasures derived from a well told character study. Dulquer here sleep walks through the basics and is merely called up on to any major challenge.

The whole movie has the same narrative energy of Diana Penty’s performance here as the female companion in Aravind’s life, an almost stoic, uninterested slog that only tempts but never for once manages to attain its supposed conviction. Roshan Andrews and his cinematographer populate the world around Aravind, within the binaries of the all-encompassing long shots and medium shots lensed beautifully, to render more depth to the on-screen isolation and fleeting sense of being stranded at distance to ones past and surroundings. The background score by Jakes Bejoy invokes an eerie sense of detachment with silences stressed as much as the trumpeting of the main theme in major plot revelations. Salute feels like a step back from the makers of the 2013 cult classic Mumbai Police, who somehow managed to strike the balance between popcorn entertainment and thoughtfully considered storytelling that accommodated the needs of a very personal chapter in a person’s life as a rewarding character study of flawed human experiences, but sadly Salute winds up neither wanting to be taken too seriously nor play out like a personal tale of redemption, falling someplace in the fringes of the playing field of staleness hovering over exciting story ideas.