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To create a humorous situation around the ubiquitous ‘Dolo 650’, like the one in Vineeth Sreenivasan’s Karam, requires a certain amount of ingenuity. But, humour depends on the setting as well as the timing, and this particular attempt at comedy may have worked in a different setting. In Karam, it just happens to be placed in the middle of a person’s attempt to breach and bust a dreaded human trafficking ring, causing the humour to fall flat.

These misplaced attempts at humour in the last act of the film, amid visuals of brutal attacks and the plight of the human trafficking victims, might even appear as bright spots compared to how the rest of the film pans out. It almost gives one the feeling of someone fulfilling their wishes of filming a typical action film set in a Western city; so much so that they didn’t even bother much about the story or the screenplay, which has more than a ring of predictability and familiarity to it.

One need not look further than Vineeth’s own Thira (2013), which also was based on human trafficking, but it had a stronger screenplay and Shobhana in the lead to lend it some gravitas. Noble Babu Thomas, who co-scripted and acted in the impressive Helen, sticks to the usual tropes in writing Karam, with not an attempt made to spring a little surprise. He also plays the protagonist Dev Mahendran, a down and out military man, for whom everything in his life has gone wrong, professionally and personally. In the present though, he has moved on and has something of an ideal happy family, but the past has ways of catching up with him.

Much of the action happens in the fictional city of Lenarco, set somewhere in Georgia. When Dev’s paths cross with that of the trafficking ring based in the city, he switches back into mission mode to save the day. The writing of the characters is often too mechanical, just to have some placeholders for building the action sequences, so much so that one is not really emotionally invested in any of them. The one character arc which makes a passing impression is that of Sana (Audrey Miriam), but it also takes some suspension of disbelief to digest the whole series of events involving her.

Dev’s troubled relationship with his father (Manoj K.Jayan) and the way it evolves later, could have been a poignant one, but here it sometimes becomes unintentionally funny. The butter-fingered goon played by Baburaj might have fit well in a quirkier movie, but does not sit well with the overall darker tone of Karam. Such ill-fitting characters and scenes spread unevenly over the narrative makes one wonder whether the makers themselves were unsure of the tone and tenor they wanted for the movie. Celebrated football manager Ivan Vukomanović gets a role that only requires him to look intimidating, but the character hardly registers. The action scenes, without a gripping narrative to support, are passable.

Karam is a staid, emotionally-hollow film on human trafficking that doesn’t even attempt to say anything new.

Karam is currently running in theatres