Vishal Menon reviews Khalifa, director Vysakh's gold-smuggling saga starring Prithviraj Sukumaran as Maamparakkal Aamir Ali, a man who inherits his family's chequered legacy of crime. Written by Jinu V. Abraham, the film is at its most original in the stretch where it breaks down the inner workings of a complicated "family business" — why Aamir must enter the smuggling trade at all, why the cartel picks his family as a scapegoat, and how his kingpin grandfather's old contacts open the door for him. Menon finds this setup elegantly constructed, with a smooth flow of cause and effect that makes the first half play like the origin story of a crime syndicate, right down to the increasingly clever methods Aamir devises to move gold into India from the Middle East, hidden in everything from cattle hooves to coffee jars to mobile phone batteries.
He is far less convinced by what surrounds it — a forced "cute" romance between Aamir and Fiza that the film would have lost nothing by skipping, and a second half that devolves into a game of oneupmanship between two warring smugglers, propped up by villains played by Neil Nitin Mukesh and Shammi Thilakan who never register as threats. Vysakh, usually dependable with his big action blocks, comes undone in the last hour, padding it with chases and cameos that feel bolted on rather than earned: a detour into the desert purely for a "cool" car chase, a bad guy who drives himself straight into a trap. The THR Bottomline is that this is a Prithviraj film with a solid setup and the most utterly generic payoff — a clever, well-detailed smuggling thriller in its first half that hardens into another mass movie about forgettable bad guys and an even more forgettable revenge motive. The gold, as Menon puts it, is just old. Khalifa is in cinemas now.
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