Review: Khalifa: The Ruler

Khalifa: The Ruler wants to be the kind of larger-than-life action thriller Malayalam cinema made a specialty of in the early 2010s, and for stretches, mostly whenever Prithviraj Sukumaran is simply allowed to occupy the frame, it gets there. He plays the smuggler-turned-kingpin with the kind of unbothered screen presence the role needs, and the action sequences Vysakh builds around him land with real scale, even if a few lean harder on spectacle than logic.

The trouble is everything holding those moments together. The screenplay leans on plot beats that felt dated a decade ago, and the villain meant to give Prithviraj's character something to push against never develops into more than a placeholder. The starry cameos, Mohanlal among them, generate an easy pop in the theatre but add little to the story itself, arriving as fan service rather than anything the plot actually needed. Jakes Bejoy's score is a genuine asset in isolated moments and oddly absent in others, mirroring the film's larger problem of style arriving in bursts rather than sustained through the whole runtime.

The trouble is everything holding those moments together.

Two and a half stars. There is a good mass entertainer buried somewhere in Khalifa, mostly in its action geography and its leading man's commitment to the part. But a script this content to coast on genre familiarity was never going to be enough to carry a film positioning itself as the first half of a bigger saga.