Kunchacko Boban gives a strong central performance, and the technical departments pitch in, too. But the writing remains superficial. The rest of this review may contain spoilers.
There’s a fabulous shot that opens Officer On Duty. It’s a single take, and we find ourselves looking at a man who’s seated at his desk. As the camera moves back, the man rises. We see he is wearing a police uniform, but only the shirt. The camera keeps pulling away and the man follows, taking us from the room the desk was in to the living room. Then he does something we don’t expect, and the camera does something even more unexpected. It turns to the left, and we see… well, I cannot reveal what we see, but it is one of the most beautifully cinematic openings in recent memory. The film is a mystery of sorts. It involves this cop, and what the camera sees after it does that left turn. It’s a kind of “prologue” – a setup – achieved solely through cinematographic means.
Nothing in the film that follows lives up to these opening moments, but director Jithu Ashraf gives us a very memorable protagonist in the cop named Harishankar. Kunchacko Boban plays this man brilliantly. The actor not only looks different – in the way he walks, for instance, in a muscular stride. He also channels the many layers of angst inside this angry man. When we first meet Harishankar, he is returning to the force after a suspension and after being demoted for assaulting another cop. But it isn’t just this humiliation that makes him use a shockingly physical interrogation tactic on a woman. He is also messed up about his domestic life, which has been equally suspended (or demoted) after a tragedy. His wife (Priya Mani) urges him to take his medicine on time. We aren’t told what it’s for, but we can make a guess that it’s a psychological condition, some kind of trauma.
Officer On Duty deals with a familiar template: a man with unresolved issues has to tackle something head on, and that, in turn, will help him resolve these issues. But the writing, by Shahi Kabir, doesn’t do much to elevate this scenario. It stays at this one-line level. The beats are all-too-familiar, and nothing goes beyond the surface. This “what you see is what you get” style of narration has its own charms, but given the layers they have attempted, it’s not enough. We get a man who has the great misfortune of watching his daughter in a sex video. Is his subsequent anger due to his perception that he has raised such a girl, who does things he considers unspeakable? Or is he mad that he has been put in this position of never being able to see her, again, as his little girl? Or is he upset that his happy family ideal has been smashed to pieces and they’ll never return to who they were?
The emphasis is on what this man does due his anger. The emphasis is on action. But we never really slow down for a few scenes to figure out what’s going through his mind. Priya Mani is terribly underused as a woman who’s battling her own issues. Again, we just get superficial bits of action – shouting, weeping – instead of moments that humanise her. Apart from the protagonist (and, to an extent, the character beautifully played by Jagadish), no one is fleshed out convincingly. The villains are the worst. They are a bunch of drugged-up youths, and they come across like cartoony caricatures. Again, the emphasis is not on who they are or how they came to be this way, but simply on what they do. They are a compilation of the easiest and worst clichés of “wayward youths”. And the closure to their characters is terribly contrived.
Apart from Kunchacko Boban holding things together, it helps that the technical departments are strong. Cinematographer Roby Varghese Raj does a lot for the mood of the movie by giving the psychological moments a handheld feel: the frame is not static, the edges are always being redefined, as though mirroring the unsteadiness of these minds. Another strong contributor is composer Jakes Bejoy, with his dynamic and atmospheric score attempting to fill in a lot of detail that the screenplay leaves unsaid. And the action sequences are decently done – though we only have to think back to the recent Ponman to see how much more an action sequence can deliver when the psychological stakes are clearly defined and the audience is filled in with highly unique situations instead of generic moments.
What saves Officer on Duty is the fact that crime dramas can get by even with a minimal level of competence. There is always a clue to track down, a suspect to be chased, a speeding car to be followed, or a character reversal that counts as a twist. In theory, the one touch I really liked is the way seemingly different crimes are all rooted in a single incident. The scenes that show these connections have a pulpy kick, and are among the film’s better moments. But towards the end, it all goes haywire again, with one contrived bit after another, like a stabbing in broad daylight or a kind of home invasion scenario. Here and there, I was reminded of thriller-dramas like Cape Fear and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – but only in terms of what this movie could have been. Officer On Duty is watchable, but given the talent involved, it’s also a missed opportunity.
