Marco movie review: Unni Mukundan’s raging portrayal fuels this brutal no-holds-barred revenge thriller

3.5/5

Marco story: Visually-impaired Victor is killed by a business tycoon's son. This sets off a chain of events between various factions of a gold empire, with Victor’s feared brother Marco vowing revenge. Unknown to him, his enemies are the ones who are around him, making his quest for retribution tougher than he thought - especially with his family too caught in the crossfire.

Marco review: Over the past few years, it's been established that a well-made action film is a sure-shot way of making a South film go ‘pan India’. While Malayalam cinema has sought a different way to achieve this, its action ventures, despite several efforts, never hit the mark. Unni Mukundan’s latest film Marco, helmed by Haneef Adeni, with its no-holds-barred approach, not only pushes this envelope but chops and thumps hard at it, even to the point of becoming gruesome.

For the uninitiated, Marco was a character, a much-derided one that Unni had played in Haneef’s Mikhael; derided, not because of how the role was played, but how it was written. In Marco, Haneef and Unni try to redeem the character — brutally by blood and bullets, and succeed too because it's filmed stylishly, has a thumping background score and a raging performance by its protagonist powering this testosterone-fuelled action-cum-revenge thriller.

Fair warning, Marco is rated A and it's because of how the violence is depicted and this not only involves dismemberment of humans and animals, but also children being murdered. The film is not for the faint-hearted. These sequences can be stomach-churning, and you might also feel that these might have been totally unnecessary. But that's the route the makers take; it's a no-holds-barred show, meaning that violence and style takes precedence over logic.

Marco is the closest Malayalam film to a Prashanth Neel movie, not in terms of scale or story, but style. Ravi Basrur’s loud and adrenaline-pumping score gets the credit for that. Unni’s swagger adds a lot to the film, especially its stylish action pieces — which include a Raid-style staircase sequence set in a house in Mattanchery and a first-person shooter-style scene in a corridor. The ‘mass’ dialogues are on point and the makers don't even try to bring in any sort of emotions to the film, to dilute what they have been aiming for.

The bond between the brothers and the scenes highlighting Marco’s toxicity are all nice touches to clearly demarcate what the makers have intended to with this film. Even the family home turning a slaughterhouse, somehow, gets to show that there's dire consequences for a revenge-fuelled journey of a hypermasculine hero. But that's the most you get in terms of the movie’s substance, with the women being relegated to almost nothing in this toxic and brutal battle for revenge.

Chandru Selvaraj’s cinematography is brilliant for an all-out action movie, and the production design team also deserves ample credit for making the film bigger than it has any right to be. The action scenes are among the most hard-hitting in a Malayalam movie, and credit to Haneef Adeni for truly pushing the barrier here.

Unni as Marco is dominant; there's a certain charisma to her portrayal. Marco is no John Wick but he can surely give the Bollywood Baaghis a run for their money and surely beat them to the punch, with his action chops. Jagadeesh as the emotionless and conniving villain Tony and Siddique as Marco's brother George are excellent in their respective roles. Debutant Abhimanyu Thilakan is definitely a talent to look forward to, playing his antagonist character Russell with the right amount of intensity, Kabir Duhan Singh's character's backstory did seem lazy with his butcher background, but his performance makes up for it.

Marco verdict: Unni Mukundan's dominant performance powers this revenge thriller, which is brutal and at times gruesome. If you are a fan of this genre, which has seen movies like Kill recently, Marco does make for a good time in theatres — thanks to its stylish action sequences and thumping background score. But be warned, it has  some stomach-churning sequences that aren't for the fainthearted.