Audacious and over cooked

Empuraan is ambitious, yes. But ambition without accountability is just chaos with a budget. Don’t wrap up real-world trauma in myth. Don’t sacrifice substance for swag. And above all -- don’t keep Mohanlal waiting in the wings.

While the action scenes are imaginatively framed, the 180-minute length needed to be curtailed. There's too much gap between these high-octane moments, especially in the first half, leaving the film to coast on Mohanlal's swag.

The attempt here is to marry the finesse of Malayalam cinema with the big-ticket experience of mass cinema...Yet, what happens in the end is a film grappling with an identity crisis, an overlong runtime, and a confused mess of a script.