In The Pet Detective, Sharafudheen plays a hero who you're supposed to like simply because he happens to be the... hero. There are no striking qualities that distinguish him. And neither does Anupama Parameswaran, who plays his girlfriend and one of his inadvertent sidekicks, nor his actual sidekick (Joemon Jyothir). The same can be said for every character. They are simply enacting roles that are as basic as they get — the private detective, the kidnapper, the smuggler (s), the gangster-businessmen... This is not a movie you go into for depth. It has none.
For Sharafudheen, the character Tony Jose Alula is tailored to accommodate his strengths as a comedian. It must've been a cakewalk, except for the challenges of getting his fight scenes right (which he does). Of late, Sharafudheen has mastered, to a certain extent, the art of deadpan delivery when necessary. It worked well in Padakkalam, the clever body-swapping comedy that released early this year. But his character in The Pet Detective is relatively more easygoing. Don't mind the film's title, because even though the story has something to do with a missing container of expensive and exotic fish, this film is no Ace Ventura. It seems to be born out of an urge to emulate the energy of the early Priyadarshan comedies, or CID Moosa, the Dasan & Vijayan trilogy, Ramji Rao Speaking, Thallumala, and a few Jackie Chan action comedies.
We are bombarded with a truckload of characters, with little to no explanation given for their motivations. Things just happen. We know who the good and bad guys are. We know someone has to get from Point A to Point B. If a movie has you wondering why a certain character was doing something or makes you work hard to remember their names, this suggests everything was written in a rush. There are admittedly a few enjoyable situations where Sharafudheen proves himself quite handy with fights and physical humour. You get the feeling that he had a blast playing a young man who inherited a detective agency from his father (Renji Panicker), who claimed to be a bigshot detective... once upon a time in Mexico. The old man taunts him for not landing a big case. When it finally does, though, it's not because someone approaches Tony for it, but he is pulled into it through sheer coincidence.
There is a sense of randomness to every event. There is chaos of both the good and bad kind. One wild climactic sequence at a theme park is neatly staged and edited (by Mukundan Unni Associates director Abhinav Sunder Nayak, who occasionally peppers the film with some of the appealing visual flourishes he applied to his own film). This moment involves many groups involved in the chase to retrieve the aforementioned valuable object, and all of them have no option but to participate in all the rides in the theme park. Not only is Tony faced with the task of evading more than two criminal gangs, but he also has to outwit a rival who happens to be a cop (Vinay Forrt), who has his sights on Tony's girlfriend and looks for every opportunity to tarnish his reputation.
The best examples of slapstick or cartoonish comedies from the 80s and 90s Malayalam cinema worked not just because of the crazy situations that the characters are hurled into, but also due to the characters’ memorability. They all possessed such unique personality traits that when scriptwriters sit down to write a new film and think of certain characters, they know exactly who they want to call. In The Pet Detective, none of the characters have a memorable quality to speak of, and it ends up being a chink in its armour. It offers a couple of hilarious moments we have not seen before, and those alone prevent the film from being a complete snoozefest.
Film: The Pet Detective
Director: Praneesh Vijayan
Cast: Sharafudheen, Anupama Parameshwaran, Joemon Jyothir, Vinay Forrt, Vijayaraghavan, Renji Panicker, Vinayakan
Rating: 2.5/5