The Malayalam series Kerala Crime Files 2: The Search for CPO Ambili Raju on Jio Hotstar is a tough nut to crack. Normally, our main grouse against web series is that they take too long to get to the point.
The slow-burning syndrome doesn’t really singe the storytelling in this painstakingly constructed series. The problem is elsewhere. Kerala Crime Files just doesn’t have an interesting enough story to tell. That is not such a bad thing, if you consider the fact that true crime is often exaggerated beyond all decency in films and serials. Here, there is no patience for overdoing things.
So yes, it does feel real. But it doesn’t hold our attention in any rewarding way. It all begins when a senior CPO Ambili Raju (The ever-dependable Indrans), goes missing. Ambili’s introduction sequence in a bus is well constructed. It whets our appetite for more. But most of what follows is a borderline bore.
The newly recruited Noble (Arjun Radhakrishnan), who is assigned to Kaniyarvila in rural Thiruvananthapuram, to investigate Ambili struggles to find his bearings in a story that refuses to cohere to clarity. It is hinted that Noble has an ignoble past.
At one point a colleague at the police station tells Noble he hopes Noble has stopped his womanizing ways after his recent marriage and that he is faithful to his wife Steffi (Noorin Shereef). This is only a passing comment. We never really know what goes on in the minds of the characters, not even the principal ones.
The police procedural is fatally imprecise while narrating Ambili’s whereabouts. What was he thinking when he disappeared? What are the cops thinking about locating him? What were the writer Ashiq Aimar and director Ahammed Khabeer thinking while abducting Ambili from the screenplay, and losing not only him but also the plot?
The Citizen Kane format as applied to the missing CPO Ambili is like using a sledgehammer to drive in a nail into a crumbling wall. The intentions are lofty. The execution is relatively poor. This is like Citizen Kane without the ‘Rosebud’ metaphor. Everything seems pale and uninspired, though I must admit the narrative’s visual appearance is fairly strong.
The atmosphere reeks of intrigue. But there isn’t much of it when we dig deeper. Also, to keep Indrans largely out of the screen is a fatal distraction. You can’t have an actor of his wherewithal flitting in and out.
Plus, there is the canine factor. Dogs play a major part in the plot. They not only help the cops to find vital clues, the four-legged heroes also occupy sizeable space in a plot that doesn’t so much meander as hobble on one foot searching for support from the screenplay, which alas, remains as elusive as our mysterious Ambili Raju. At the end I still knew next to nothing about his conduct. And it didn’t matter.
