Somewhere in the grand tradition of Malayalam cinema – the industry that gave the world Drishyam, Kumbalangi Nights, and Vaazha, someone greenlit Patriot. Someone looked at Mammootty, Mohanlal, Fahadh Faasil, and Rajiv Menon, assembled what can be called the Mount Rushmore of South Indian cinema, handed them a script apparently written during a power cut, and produced something that drags like a broken escalator going uphill.
Let’s begin with the names, because the writing room clearly exhausted itself there and called it a day. Our heroes? Daniel James, the scientist, and Rahim Naik, the army martyr. Patriots, you see – diverse, secular, capital-P Patriotic. Our villains? Sundaram and Shakti Sundaram. The subtlety of a sledgehammer.
The film doesn’t trust you to identify the antagonists through, say, characterisation, so it stamps their moral alignment directly onto their birth certificates using the time-honoured tradition of giving Hindu names to anti-nationals. Groundbreaking cinema. Truly fearless storytelling.
Then there is Jyoti – a female character whose entire narrative function, from first scene to last, appears to be sleeping with a married man called Michael. Michael, for his part, starts out working for the villain Shakti Sundaram, presumably because the pay was good, before conveniently switching sides to help Daniel and Rahim defeat the Sundarams. Because nothing cements a redemption arc quite like abandoning your extramarital affair and shooting your former employer. Character development, Patriot style.
Now, Mammootty and Mohanlal sharing the screen should be a cinematic event. A cultural moment. The kind of thing that gets written about in film retrospectives. Here, it is closer to a hostage situation – two legends trapped in amber, looking vaguely confused about how they arrived at this particular project.
Fahadh Faasil, a man who made Joji look effortless and elevated Pushpa simply by showing up, is apparently also capable of appearing in this. Even the presence of Rajiv Menon, one of the finest cinematographer-directors in South Indian film history, cannot save the frame from what’s happening inside it.
The genre, described generously as a spy-science-fiction-tech-action-thriller, demands pace, wit, tension, and at least one plot twist that doesn’t telegraph itself from the opening credits. Patriot delivers none of these. It is a film in which the most sophisticated technology on display is the character-naming convention. The pacing suggests the editor was also confused about whether this was a patriotic epic or a lunch break.
The tragedy, and it is a genuine one, is that Malayalam cinema has earned hard-won international respect for nuance, restraint, and storytelling ambition. Patriot is what happens when that reputation is used as a launching pad for lazy, paint-by-numbers nationalism dressed up in expensive casting decisions. The stars deserved better. The audience deserved better. Even the genre, maligned as it often is, deserved better.
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