Molly Aunty Rocks! (2012) [Film Review]

Molly Aunty Rocks; or, Revathy vs. the IRS

This time let’s endeavour ourselves to explore the latest film in which Revathy starred as the leading heroine. The movie can’t be anything else than the Malayam picture from 2012, awesomely entitled Molly Aunty Rocks!

Release Info 

Directed by: Ranjith Sankar Starring: Revathy, Prithviraj, Lalu Alex

Language: Malayalam Movie Industry: Mollywood Runtime: 128 min

Synopsis

The movie centres on the character of Molly (Revathy) who is an uncompromising, yet very kind woman living in her family village in the state of Kerala, while her husband and children are in America. When Molly quits her job as a bank clerk and prepares to join them, she receives an invoice from Indian Revenue Service that urges her to settle an unpaid local property tax. Molly having no knowledge of the sum goes to the IRS office and by firmly rejecting the “traditional” way of dealing with such issues (aka *corruption*), she unleashes a living hell upon herself in form of a young, rich, and ruthless bureaucrat called Pranav (Prithviraj).

Rocking experience (of disbelief)

First of all, during the first watching of this film, I had a feeling that this is a letdown. The story is interesting in itself, especially considering the fact that such awful cases happen in real life, but the way it was presented on screen leaves much to be wished for. The first problem is with the character of Molly. Unfortunately, as it turns out, Molly Aunty isn’t as rocking as the title actually says.

In fact, Molly is one annoying nuisance. She leads an American lifestyle and believes in the American way of settling things down, which constantly drives people mad around her. In other words, she is uncompromising, or more appropriately egotistical, which never works to her advantage when confronting Pranav. For instance, Molly’s relatives come up with various ways to resolve the tax problem, including mediation of a priest, intervention of a lawyer, or simply apologising to Pranav, but Molly is far too proud to do something like that. Even the husband (Lalu Alex) is not able to convince his wife, which eventually leads to the final showdown in court.

On the other hand, Pranav is a real douche bag. The guy is a mere loan shark who thinks that has power over people because he is charge of the local tax office. Sure, Molly pissed him off with her impertinence, but it doesn’t give him the right to change the sum of unpaid tax within just overnight. In addition, it turns out towards the end that even he wasn’t so fair and square with his own taxes...

Lastly, there is one more issue to be mentioned. Namely, the reason why Molly wasn’t able to pay up already inflated tax. All of a sudden we get to know that Molly was secretly working for “a noble cause”, hence the case is dismissed and she becomes a hero of the public. I’m aware that the aim of the picture was to present the situation in which a hard-working person gets nearly crushed by ruthless bureaucracy, but such a theme would be more fitting to a drama rather than a family film, in which the approach to the issue is very light-hearted.

However, the abovementioned issues are completely outshone by the brilliant performance from Revathy. The actress saves the rough script with the ultimate display of her overwhelming gracefulness and charm.

Recommendations

All in all, Molly Aunty Rocks! is an ordinary film which you can easily watch with your family to pass the time. It is nothing exceptional, but also nothing horrific. If you are into human interest stories, you’ll surely like Molly Aunty Rocks!.

To righteously grade this picture, I believe that it deserves two scores:

Overall score: 6/10
Score of Revathy’s performance: 20/10!