Director Vysakh has made some of Malayalam cinema’s biggest blockbusters, but he still doesn’t have a clue about how to handle romance. In a fairly straightforward first half hour of the film, you’d expect to understand the Ali family's hierarchy and criminal legacy; Vysakh forces a “cute” love story between Prithviraj Sukumaran’s Aamir Ali and a girl named Fiza. There’s some background here about Aamir’s ailing grandpa and how he wants to see him get married as his dying wish, but you can smell the fluff from miles away.
There are some bougainvillaea flowers (a visual he’s repeated right from Pokkiri Raja), a smirking Prithviraj, Jakes Bejoy’s pleasing score and an utterly clueless Fiza in a meet-cute about the kind of girl Aamir should bring home. He delivers his pickup line, smiles for the camera and exits like he’s scored a big theatre moment. After having watched the whole film, it dawns on us that nothing would have been lost had they decided to begin with Aamir playing a full-grown man with a wife and a son already. But by forcing this generic meet-cute, we feel like we’re just waiting until someone comes along to kill Fiza.
You sympathise with writer Jinu Abhraham for thinking that Aamir Ali’s family members must matter to us too. In a sense, the best part of the film is when it tries to break down the inner workings of a complicated “family business” and how Aamir inherits his chequered past. This setup is elegantly written with a smooth flow of cause and effect. Why must Aamir get into the gold smuggling business? Because there’s no other way for him to get his father freed. Why do the bad guys choose Aamir’s family as their scapegoat? Because of the aforementioned chequered past. How does Aamir manage to make his way into a seedy crime cartel? Because of the contacts left behind by his kingpin grandfather.
All of this makes sense, and the details are so well integrated into the plot that you feel like you’re watching the origins story of a complex crime syndicate. These are also portions in which you see Aamir transform from the goofy lover boy he was in the earlier meet-cute. With one well-written inciting incident, Aamir chooses a path that’s different from his father’s, opting for something that makes him more like his grandfather. He’s got some big shoes to fill as the film inserts lore about the greatness of his grandfather Mambarakal Ahmed Ali.
To me, it’s this setup that felt most original about Khalifa, which is otherwise embarrassingly familiar. From the transformation we witness in Aamir, the first half follows the many clever methods he comes up with to smuggle gold into India from the Middle East. The setup of these scenes is simple: just how we’ve been witnessing from the Irupatham Nootandu films, right up until Dileep’s Runway. Just as the customs/excise officials are about to catch hold of smuggled goods, the hero comes up with another clever new way to get it bypassed through them. So if Aamir wants to bring gold bars into India, he has the hooves of cattle, jars of coffee powder and even batteries of mobile phones to hide gold.
Predictably, he’s always two steps ahead of both the bad guys as well as the government officials. But as long as they find new ways to keep smuggling, the film remains fairly engaging. It’s when it enters into the second half that it also devolves into another game of one-upmanship between two warring gold smugglers. The bad guys, played by Neil Nithin Mukesh and Shammi Thilakan, are utterly generic and even the use of snippets from a real-life gold smuggling case doesn’t solve this. The coolness of the film’s writing is as good as over as we enter this zone, and what’s left is for Vysakh to pad up with gimmicks he’s familiar with.
But this is where the film is at its most basic. Vysakh, who is usually dependable for the way he plans his big action blocks, comes supremely undone in the last hour of Khalifa. The chases, which were the best part of his previous release Turbo, feel like forced additions, even though they have nothing to do with the film. Just when Aamir is driving to the airport, we see him take a massive detour into the desert, just for Vysakh to show you a “cool” desert car chase. Just when Aamir and a bad guy chase each other, the latter drives himself straight into what Aamir calls a trap.
These work best as fragments, a lot like how cool action ideas are expected to make the film better. But when this element is pushed too far, it does nothing for it and the characters in it. And to foolproof the hollowness of the second half even further, we see the makers trying their best by inserting one too many cameos. But by this point, despite the time and the money the film spends to make us feel the enormity of this moment, we’re exhausted by how little the team goes on to do with what could have been a cool premise. The gold is just old in this mass film.