Bazooka (2025) Movie Review: An Unsalvageable Mess From the Beginning to End

Movies based on a gaming premise are nothing new for cinema enthusiasts. In the cult favorite “Ready Player One,” the Chinese blockbuster drama “Love O2O,” “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” “Wreck-It Ralph,” or “Free Guy,” world-building acts as the strongest fulcrum, elevating the immersive quality of the movies. The 2025 Malayalam language thriller “Bazooka,” written and directed by debutant Deeno Dennis, is one such genre-bending film that merges multiple genres, including action, gaming, heist, and thriller. But does the film pass with flying colors? Or does the execution make the idea on paper look foolish and unbearably tiresome? Let’s find out.

“Bazooka,” as intriguing as the name sounds, has an equally intriguing premise. It follows a serial robber, a monomaniac gamer, who commits multiple challenging robberies in the city and comes out unscathed, proving to be a menace to the city police. Enter Kochi ACP, the prestigious, decorated police officer Mr. Benjamin Joshua IPS, and his well-trained team that has been cleaning up Kochi of its criminal facades for the last few years.

Tarnishing their goodwill within the department is someone who introduces himself as Mr. Mario. He commits repeated robberies in and around the city, mirroring popular games like Snake & Ladder, Temple Run, Super Mario, etc. Following the modus operandi of Inform and Rob, he challenges Benjamin and the team’s efficiency time and again. This is when Benjamin teams up with a retired Forensic expert, John Caesar (Mammootty), to lock Mr. Mario.

A thread-like game-themed serial robbery on paper demands very engaging world-building to engulf the audience and convince them of the proceedings that follow. Instead, “Bazooka” serves a stale platter of disjointed sequences that serve no purpose and are clueless from the word go. The writing is flawed everywhere. The writing fails to craft a convincing character arc for its leading man and supporting characters equally. Several cardboard characters come in and go without making any lasting impact.

Bazooka (2025) — A still from “Bazooka” (2025)

Another irksome flaw of “Bazooka” is the choice of outdated games and its robbery recreation. One would guess a premise like this to have deeply technical and psychological inter-connected threads, but what comes out is something as basic as an early 2000s thriller film. The production design, graphics, and animation feel too cheap for a movie that bases itself on the gaming world. The film tests the audience’s intelligence and patience by spoon-feeding ridiculous details nobody asked for. Be it John Caesar’s deeply personal discussions with Sunny Varghese, his passion for gaming, or Benjamin’s highly talented SIT squad, everything leverages too much in the final 30-minute third act that doesn’t really pay off.

“Bazooka” makes some terrible editing choices. Not that the film would have been better. But it would have at least been watchable with better editing decisions. Nimish Ravi and Roby Varghese Raj’s camera work is a saving grace. However, it does not add any value to an already hollow product. Saeed Abbas’s score is a jargon of painfully loud and annoying music samples. While Deeno Dennis’s writing deserves all the blame for under-utilizing a talent like Mammootty, Mammootty’s stylist deserves a raise for presenting him so well onscreen. His stylist is probably the only person who has gotten the memo right in the film.

Coming to performances, Mammootty deserves a written apology from Deeno Dennis for doing such a massive disservice to his talent. As a legendary actor who has been nailing multiple human psyches onscreen like no one’s business for decades, the actor gets such an undercooked deal in “Bazooka.” He plays an unsalvageable character who takes a 180° shift so unconvincingly. His caricaturish performance would make you miss the performer in him that immortalized roles like Koduman Potty (Bramayugam), Murikkum Kunnath Haji (Paleri Manikyam) and Bhaskara Pattelar (Vidheyan). Even in his latest not-so-good films like Turbo and Dominic & the Ladies’ Purse, Mammotty has been able to hold the audience’s attention throughout. But he becomes rather annoying in “Bazooka.”

Gautham Vasudev Menon’s performance as Benjamin IPS is predictably bad. His dialogue delivery is still on the rocks, and he never convinces you as a smart cop on the hunt for a serial robber. His character is present throughout the film. But does he add anything substantial to the film? No. So is the case with the supporting cast, too. None of the actors make an impact. They enter and exit and remain as forgettable as the film in its entirety.

Sidharth Bharathan, who stunned everyone with his exceptional performance in “Bramayugam,” is given a raw deal in “Bazooka.” He gets a character that any random junior artist could do and is criminally wasted. Shine Tom Chacko’s cameo is just another useless gimmick that does little to nothing to the film’s staleness.

To conclude, “Bazooka” is a movie full of red herrings. It does not do one thing right and is probably one of the worst films of Mammootty after delivering some stellar works in a row. What could have been an engaging, landmark techno-thriller of sorts has relegated itself to a terrible film that wastes an actor as powerful as Mammootty. What is all the more disappointing is his vexatious performance, a once-in-a-blue-moon kinda phenomenon that deeply hurt the fan in me.