Drishyam: How Ajay Devgn fails to walk in Mohanlal's shoes

*Spoilers ahead*

Indian cinema has had a dearth of good crime thrillers, so the success of Jeetu Joseph's 2013 Malayalam hit, starring Mohanlal, is understood. It has that essential ingredient lacking in many of our cinematic experiences: a nifty, engrossing story. It explains why the film sparked a series of remakes in Telugu, Kannada, Tamil and more recently in Hindi.

Drishyam 2013, or for that matter 2015, is not entirely an edge-of-the-seat experience as one expects a thriller to be. There is no suspense as to who the criminals are. Their identities in fact are revealed in the first 30 minutes. Still you are hooked because the criminals are ordinary folks, a happy-go-lucky middle class family. The act of killing, albeit unintended, and a dead body, turn their life upside down. Jeetu Joseph's script rightly highlights the psychological effects of it on the family's female members. There's guilt, anxiety, incessant fear of being caught and spending the remainder of your life in jail. There's also a real sense of helplessness that there will be no justice; that no one will believe your version of events no matter how hard you try. Drishyam taps into common man's lack of faith in the very forces which are supposed to protect us. Joseph further establishes this by showing how the local police officer is a corrupt fellow who doesn't pay his dues at an eatery and forcibly takes money off people.

In Drishyam remake (2015), Vijay's (Ajay Devgn) daughter, Anju (Ishita Dutta), is convinced her life is doomed after a guy who she met at a nature camp shows her a clip in which she is secretly shot taking a bath. If she doesn't want the clip to be leaked online and subsequently avoid her family being shamed, then she has to fulfil his sexual needs. The guy is also the inspector general's son so he can get what he wants and get away with whatever too.

Interestingly, in Masaan too, Devi, a young woman feels trapped after the police break into a hotel room, which she and a guy have rented to satisfy their sexual needs. The police shoot a video clip of the woman in which she is crying, quivering and just about covering herself with a bed sheet. That in the police's eyes is proof of her immorality for they haven't caught her in the act itself.  The clip here is again a tool of victim-bashing and blackmailing. But then Devi doesn't feel guilt for the act itself, audiences are made to believe later on. Instead, she feels more responsible for her lover's death through suicide. Devi is a bold, adventurous, independent and ambitious young woman, so why is she so passive when it comes to the cop, who is blackmailing her and her father? Most of her actions later suggest that she really doesn't care about what people think of her. In what is an otherwise great film, Devi's trajectory doesn't feel entirely convincing.

In Drishyam (2013), you get a sense of family's dilemma. Joseph constructs a strong protagonist in Georgekutty (Mohanlal), a Syrian Christian cable operator who is also a devoted husband and father. He may be illiterate but he is clever. A self-made man, he loves watching all sorts of movies until the wee hours. All those hours spent engrossed in front of the TV have not gone to waste. He borrows ideas from movies on how to fool the police and give his family a perfect alibi. (Whoever thought that films don't contribute to the intellectual development of people can see Georgekutty in action and see the many perks of watching films.) By doing so, Georgekutty is not just protecting his family but also cooking up a story, a compelling one. It's almost as if he is making a film in which he is the director, the writer, the hero. In Georgekutty, Joseph has created a hero whose biggest virtue is his brain and not brawn, the one which most movies value most.

The talented Mohanlal further enhances the character, making him an endearing fellow who audiences want to root for as he outsmarts the police at their investigation. It's not an easy task as the hero here is no saint. He has done his share of bad deeds. But Mohanlal's amiable presence convinces viewers that it's all for a good cause, that there is no alternative. He delivers a commanding performance, carrying the film on his shoulders.

The Nishikant Kamat-directed Hindi remake for most part sticks to the tried-and-tested, successful formula of the original, which celebrates the resourceful mind of its hero. If only the Hindi version had an actor as good as the original then this Drishyam too could have wowed viewers. Devgn fails to lose himself in the part. His act as a devoted family man isn't convincing enough. And so a promising story is left with a few, scattered moments of thrill most of which occur only after Tabu enters the film as Vijay's nemesis. Now that's a great actor. The fact that one needs a supporting character to come and rescue the proceedings is further proof of why this Drishyam's visuals are not as arresting as the original's.