Writer and director: Gautham Vasudev Menon
Cast: Varun, Krishna, Raahei
Available in: Theatres
Duration: 130 minutes
I would rather have the headline read, “There is no Josh in Joshua.” Not just because it’s true and has a nice pun to it, but also because Gautham Vasudev Menon seems to be obsessed with the name. Even before the title card is played, we have heard Joshua multiple times — a love song too has many mentions of “Joshua” with rhyming lines that go something like ‘Naan Un Joshua, Enodu Serndhu Vaazha Vaa’.
Yes, the overdose of ‘Joshua’ makes us sigh a few times but why are we overfed? At first, we wonder whether it’s because the film is so focused on its hero that it wants to hype both actor Varun and his character Joshua. Yet something doesn’t add up because we don’t celebrate him much, and we slowly realise neither does the film. Joshua is a contract killer but except for one murder, we see the rest of his introduction in an animated form. His flashback too is reduced to two dialogues that don’t impact us. In the middle of this, he falls in love with Kundavi (Raahei) and decides not to be a contract killer anymore. He then becomes the head of a protection unit and we are told that through a third-person narration and in montages, which again only pushes one away from understanding the protagonist. So, we begin to doubt the film’s intention. Is the film then only obsessed with the name “Joshua”? This could also be seen in the way Kundavi’s dialogues are written.