Tejabhai & Family movie review

Movie : Tejabhai & Family
Director : Dipu Karunakaran
Music : Deepak Dev
Cast : Prithviraj, Akhila

Director Dipu Karunakaran’s Tejabhai & Family, in which Prithviraj plays the hero, is a potpourri of some of those old slapstick comedies with puerile storylines rehashed in an amateurish way.

Pointing out this film’s problems is like drawing up a grocery list. A dull script, boring sequences, uninspiring performances and the often jarring music adds to the burden.

The storyline looks surprisingly silly. Tejabhai (Prithviraj) is a dreaded underworld don based at Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. He runs a criminal empire with swanky cars and even choppers to travel, smart looking hunks in suits as hit men and the don is also armed with ready-to-use dialogues which are delivered in style, quite often. (Sample: “Never… ever… see you again”)

One fine day, Teja falls desperately in love with a beautiful girl Vedika (Akhila). To impress her, he acts as if he is a man full of virtues and voila, there she is ready to dance to his tunes. Things get serious when the girl’s father Damodarji (Thalaivasal Vijay) insists that his daughter’s beau should hail from a reputed family and shouldn’t have any police cases against him!

Damodarji, by the way, always seek permission from a fraud swami named Rajaguru Vashyavachassu (Suraj Venjarammoodu) before taking any decision. Teja appears before the girl’s dad as a nice boy Roshan Varma and heads to Thiruvananthapuram for ‘finding’ some relatives for himself.

Now, almost the entire gang of comedians of Malayalam cinema (Jagathy Sreekumar, Jagadeesh, Salim Kumar, Kochu Preman, Indrans, Kulappully Leela, Bindu Panicker, Manju Pillai and so on) begin their buffoonery as they appear as Teja’s relatives. Damodarji sends his daughter to Teja’s house and she lives there, to check if his claims are true, before giving the nod to their alliance! Now, how idiotic is that?

If you are still interested in the proceedings, watch it for yourself at the theatres as Dipu Karunakaran unleashes this absurd journey unabated. If you are not the kind who can laugh listening to Suraj’s double meaning dialogues, the former ‘sex queen’ Shakkeela playing a comic avatar in one scene and Bheeman Raghu peeing inside the drawing room, it is better to stay away from this misadventure.

Shamdat’s visuals are fine but Deepak Dev’s music is not really fine. The song Oru madhurakkinavin… from the 1984 film Kanaamarayathu has been remixed and picturised in a pathetic way, for the film.

Prithviraj, who has been going through a rather rough patch of late, seems to have erred in his selection of script here. He has tried to be comical at times and to act tough during the rest of the scenes, but you have to accept the fact that this one is too badly written for him to do anything spectacular.

Akhila, who was earlier seen in Karyasthan, looks cute but has nothing much to do. The big group of comedians repeats what they have been doing in most of the other films.

With the kind of backdrop of a don who disguises as a normal next door boy, we would imagine that the story of Tejabhai & Family could have been inspired from the Munnabhai series, while going for the film. After watching it, we genuinely wish that it would have been better if the makers actually found some inspiration from any sensible movie. No such luck here, this one is horrifyingly bad!

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