'Aadu 3' Movie Review: GOAT-ed Characters Get Butchered In This Wild Bore

One suspects that the experience of reading the script of Aadu 3: One Last Ride: Part 1 must have been a thousand times more rewarding than the experience of watching the film. This is not because one’s imagination isn’t limited by budgets or by performances, nor does it have much to do with this film getting lost in execution. Of all the films of this franchise, this is the only film that relies almost entirely on literal humour. Instead of trusting these characters to deliver the goods with the film’s organically silly situations, Midhun Manuel’s writing goes overboard with wordplay and puns. Now, these are fun at the beginning and you also understand the cleverness of some of the usages, but you can't help but imagine how much funnier it may have been to read these lines on paper, rather than make a huge ensemble present them, each with their own eccentricities and styles. Instead of figuring a specific brand of humour for each character (like in the previous films), Midhun chooses to repeat the same style of dialogues for all, lending a homogeneous dullness to a film that could have gone anywhere.

The examples of this range from fun to downright grating; we get the word ‘tourist’ in a mix-up with the word ‘terrorist'. A man named Walter is called ‘water’. ‘Pattu’ book becomes patikkal book (cannot be translated). The actor Saiju Kurup is chosen very specifically to play a general named Koma Kurup. Skibidi is rhymed with kabadi and an inconsequential character is named Jency, only to make a Gen-Z joke and then we get to listen to every possible iteration of the name Pappan (including Pappan, Padmanabhan and Paappaan). More than the idea of forcing puns into most lines, it’s the setup of the joke that becomes jarring. In most of these, we get one of the films egomaniacal characters to mouth what appears to sound like a punch dialogue, only for the “massiness” of the scene to be deflated by a particularly silly line. So just when King Padmanabhan (Jayasurya) delivers a rousing speech about preparing his army to fight Tipu Sultan himself, the film sneaks in a slapstick gag of a metal lamp falling on his head.

This is not because we do not understand the tonality of this beloved franchise or its OTT humour; it’s just that in this film, everything feels so laboured, like everyone’s shouting on the top of their lungs to underline a joke. We miss the randomness that made Arakkal Abu (Saiju Kurup) such a sweetheart despite being a coward. We miss the straight face with which Captain Cleetus (Dharmajan) could say the dumbest of things and still make it sound believable. Most of all, we miss the empty machismo of Shaji Pappan (Jayasurya) and the sheer conviction with which he’d bought into his own mythmaking. With the first two films getting conceptualised as a spoof of the mass action hero movie, Shaji Pappan was always meant to be more than a regular hero. It put a spin on a million protagonists and dared to ask the question…what if the mass action hero gets backache? And what if his wife dumps him and elopes with his sidekick?

What were hilarious ideas from a decade ago, now feels repetitive and tiring. What’s more, instead of staying with its strengths, Aadu 3 wants to become even bigger as it tries to spoof "THE Pan-Indian movie" this time. Which means that we get three timelines united by one McGuffin. We also get a film that criss-crosses between the past and the present with a reincarnation angle getting stuffed in. So, when the film gets Dude (Vinayakan, in the film’s only genuinely entertaining presence) to mock sequences from Aadujeevitham and to then reuse his own lines from Jailer (“Manasilayo?”), these jokes feel out of place and awkward in a film that has lost its identity.

To be fair, the film’s biggest problem arises from several jagged editing decisions. The first half feels much longer than the second, so that the key moments are not punctuated to leave you feeling the basic highs of a big action movie. More than one film, the final edit feels more like a product that was split into two films, somewhere during the making. What’s more, we find the film playing out like a long assembly line of intro scenes. With each character getting its big moment (and theme song), that too across two timelines, we feel removed from the narrative flow, just so one more character can make an entry. Not one of them feels remotely memorable and none of the big budget ideas stick. And in all the noise of recreating the magic of a truly unique franchise, the third part ends with the unnecessary promise of another film. As with every idea that turns into a business proposal, Aadu is forced to become a big, bloated, big-budgeted status vehicle driven by just one misplaced idea…that bigger, always means better. And as sad as it sounds, the titular Aadu (Goat) doesn't even get a scene here.