Debutant director Jeethu Ashraf’s Malayalam police procedural has at least three people hanging themselves before the end. Perhaps more — I can’t be sure. The writer’s appetite for tapping into potentially self-destructive characters is insatiable.
Officer On Duty carries a disturbingly gloomy aura, as though to suggest that life is actually a series of deaths.
The hero, if he can be labelled as such, is a burnt-out, seriously disturbed cop, Hari (Kunchacko Boban) — let’s say the baap of Anant Velankar from Ardh Satya — who thinks nothing of kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach (yes, shock tactics are a salient kick in this overleden drama), and who applies third-degree torture on a suspect until he dies: the suspect, not the cop.
At home, Hari’s temper disorder has already cost him his elder daughter. His lovely wife Geetha (Priyamani, who deserves a lot more) takes the brunt of his ire. Hari feels guilty about his wife’s death, as he rightly should. He must also feel guilty for driving a bus conductor’s daughter to suicide. But I am not sure about this one: with a protagonist who hits men, women, and children indiscriminately, your guess about his next move is as good as mine.
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Written by Shahi Kabir, Officer On Duty suffers from a serious identity disorder. It wants to make a telling statement on drugs and how they blind the taker’s better judgement. But then, Hari — the cop protagonist — doesn’t really take any drugs. Still, his behaviour is more violent than the antagonists, who are dressed as punks and keep snorting and sniffing as if cocaine is a cousin to sinusitis. And yes, they are scum who have come from “outside.”
Kerala would be paradise were it not for these bloody migrants… or so we are expected to believe. The belief system in this morbid motion picture is defined by the barrel of a gun and the hangman’s noose — sometimes a mix of both.
The cinematography (Roby Varghese Raj) doesn’t make viewing this painfully truculent film any easier. The frames and visuals are stuck between urgency and agency, trying to hold our attention while failing to remain faithful to the mood of the moment.
Some of the plotting is so preposterous, it verges on the suicidal (that being the requisite mood of the presentation). The impunity with which the scummy, drugged bunch kills cops and their relatives makes you wonder — isn’t khaki safe anymore? The themes of sex crimes and blackmail get submerged in mounds of exacerbated sensationalism.
Finally, Officer On Duty gives us not one character to take home. No one is inviting Hari home — not without checking all the fans. No noose is certainly good noose
