Theru Review | A Tidy Second Half Makes This Thriller a Passable One

Theru, the new film from SJ Sinu, is a thriller that starts off in a very usual way without much excitement. But the way the film shifts its manner in the second half and becomes a survival thriller holds your interest. With moral dilemmas of characters and an intense struggle of the central character to get out of the mess he was in occupying the movie’s latter half, Theru is flawed but watchable.

Hari is a young man whose father has this dream of seeing him as a police officer. His father always goes to the post office just to check whether the appointment order has reached there. One day when his father was going somewhere, he got stopped by police for not wearing a helmet, and the humiliation that followed eventually resulted in his father’s death. There was this urge in Hari to react against this, and what we see in the movie Theru is the consequences he had to face for that reaction.

The initial happy family sequences and the father’s death aren’t really creating much interest in the movie as it feels very familiar and, to be honest, slightly outdated too. But when the film approaches sequences after Hari’s father’s death, there is an effort to make everything more character-driven, and the movie is not trying to look at things from Hari’s perspective alone. Post-interval, there is a scenario in which three men are running away from the police. They are running away because if they don’t, the police will make them the culprits for something they haven’t done. And the writing invests more time in how the police operate, which gives the whole scenario an interesting balance. Towards the end, the movie is a bit stretched, but it never becomes a deal breaker.

Amith Chakalakkal is fine as Hari, and the challenge is a lot more physical here rather than emotional, as his character is constantly running and fighting in the second half of the film. Kalabhavan Shajon, who plays the role of the CI, was really good. The experience of someone who knows how to deal with an unprecedented situation was evident in his performance. Baburaj gets the role of a rough cop who gradually transitions. Vijayaraghavan, Sminu Sijo, Nilja, Ria Saira, Sanju Sivaram, Pramod Veliyanad, Asees Nedumangad, etc., are the other names in the cast.

Dinil PK, who wrote this film, is more interested in the moral dilemma. Even though it looks like a revenge drama where Amith’s character is after the police officer whose actions lead to his personal loss, Dinil tries to show the story from the side of the police officer’s perspective as well. I felt SJ Sinu’s making made it much more simplistic and shredded down the dilemmas. In the movie’s trailer, there was a scene where Pramod Veliyand’s character expressed his wish to see his child, and such phases of anxiety and regret were chopped off from the movie. The film’s climax shows us that the script wasn’t really designed for a movie with a hero.

The running time of Theru is under two hours, and the good thing is that they are not beating around the bush with irrelevant content. An updated presentation style, especially in the film’s first half, would have made it a lot more engaging. But the tight second half helps the movie to enter an intense space, and the end result is a passable thriller.