Aadu 3

How can a cinematic idea, which has been milked to its limits, be stretched further without seeming like the filmmaker is flogging a dead goat, er, horse? Bring in multiple timelines, make the same characters do the same things but in different time periods and maybe let these characters from various eras collide. Well, that is exactly what writer and filmmaker Midhun Manuel Thomas does with Aadu 3: One Last Ride: Part 1, the third instalment of the spoofy satire Aadu Oru Bheekara Jeeviyaanu (2015).

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.