When describing the films that inspired Patriot and the films he enjoyed most from the 1980s, director Mahesh Narayanan spoke of a special love for films directed by IV Sasi and written by T Damodaran. Talking about films such as Ee Nadu (1982), Mahesh described them as perfectly crafted commercial hits that addressed social issues without ever diluting them. Films of this ilk, which starred the “promising young stars of the era” such as Mammootty, Mohanlal or Ratheesh, often dealt with corrupt politicians and their tirade against society, as they take on workers' unions, women's issues, the environment or all of the above.
Set fifty years after those conflicts, Patriot deals with another kind of pollution, not so much the environment as it has to do with people’s minds. As the cliché goes, data is the new oil and privacy feels like a pipe dream in a country that’s being ruled by a corrupt politician (Rajiv Menon) and his even more corrupt nepo-kid Sakthi, played by Fahadh Faasil. The evil corporation they run looks like a big IT firm, the kind with glass office buildings and screens taking up more space than its employees.
The spyware application that is installed into phones of those who are high and mighty is called Periscope, and it’s obvious that it’s a stand-in for Pegasus, the Israeli spyware that became a topic of contention three years ago. Patriot begins with an easy-to-understand use case scenario of just an app and how it trickles down to affect the common folk. From thereon, the spread of this app is treated like the spread of a flesh-eating virus, consuming everything in its path.
This sets the mood, the plot and the conflict, and Mammootty’s Dr Daniel is the man being given the responsibility to bring Periscope under control. He’s cool, charismatic and has a drinking problem, and as Dr Daniel, he is supposed to be exhausted, brought alive just to save the day. With the film soon turning into a slick fugitive-on-the-run styled thriller, Patriot jumps from one country to another, not because it wants to show off its big budget, but because Dr Daniel needs asylum.
The film also feels like a bigger plot that Mahesh Narayanan must have been obsessed with as he was working on his earlier screen life drama C U Soon (2020). For a film that talks about a world like in George Orwell’s 1984, in which the whole world is being monitored, some of the film’s best scenes are those that take place on screens. As multiple eyeballs keep hunting for Dr Daniel, the film underlines the dangers of a reckless spyware app and the issues that come with 24X7 surveillance.
A great example of this comes in the form of Jyoti’s backstory, played by Darshana Rajendran. Edited brilliantly, this montage traces her entire life, the trap that’s set for her and the many privacy breaches that lead to her capture. By placing lead characters like Jyoti deep within the confines of this app, Patriot shows you the consequences without having to go into elaborate explanations.
This is also why I thought it was incredibly clever to subvert the conflict in the film during Mohanlal’s big introduction scene. Apart from being the brawn to Mammootty’s brain, we see the two onscreen legends use something as old-school as Morse code to communicate secret messages, sidestepping the evil tech-bros who cannot look beyond the computer screen. This retro approach to their conversation makes all the jokes about "two veterans" take on a new level of coolness — like they’re being addressed directly to us.
Even when the film begins to discuss dense topics, while handling multiple characters and subplots, there’s never a moment that feels long or unnecessary. It maintains the same tense pacing throughout, and even the big emotional moments are handled with so much class that we never feel the film slipping away. Rajiv Menon and Fahadh Faasil play the big bad guys of this big bad world, but the writing is clever enough to accommodate a complex personal dynamic between the two, surprising you in places where you’d thought you had the film figured out. A scene from earlier that is set inside a fighter jet gets a superb payoff towards the end, further underlying the motivations of characters that do not often get their full arc.
Apart from a few portions that may feel particularly verbose, mainly due to how much the film needs to explain, Patriot feels slick despite a 180-minute runtime. The only other minor displeasure comes in the form of the big action set-pieces. Although written well into the screenplay, these high-concept sequences do not fully come together on screen, even though all of them sound like incredibly unique standalone ideas.
Patriot is a film that does a lot of things right with a lot to love in the writing, its subtle scores (Sushin Shyam is the composer) and the topics it explores. It’s also a mini miracle that the film comes close to achieving the sky-high expectations we’d set for a Mammootty-Mohanlal reunion, that too with stars like Fahadh, Kunchacko Boban and Nayanthara, getting the space and the dignity their characters deserve. It might be miles away from greatness, but it’s not often that we see a whistleblower thriller with so many unforgettable whistle-worthy moments.