At its core, Bazooka has an interesting concept to play with. It is essentially a cat and mouse chase that transpires between the cops and a serial robbing gang, with the entire arena playing out like a video game. There are clues to the puzzle in line with some of the most famous games that in turn lead you to the next set of clues, in what seemed to be an exciting premise on paper. There has been a growing trend of thrillers from the Malayalam Film Industry that are known to unlock new areas with respect to its concept. If Rekhachithram (2025) was a thriller dating back to an event on a film set, or Pravinkoodu Shappu (2025) and Officer On Duty (2025) having cold opens with respect to a death that transpires at the start of a film, or even Dominic And The Ladies’ Purse (2025) that felt like an outlandish investigative thriller that soon ends up tackling an important issue by the end of it, the common link is with regards to the innovation that each thriller brings to the table. This is not always a good thing when it comes to Bazooka because it decides to dabble with its narrative structure to an extent of disconnecting the viewers from the drama.

The cold open in Bazooka is an interesting one with a possible arrest that transpires at the start, with a vague explanation centered around a painting. You also are privy to some of its themes early on – clues being revealed early on without context at a creepy looking Halloween Party, almost symbolizing a graphic novel of sorts. This, before jumping to another setting wherein you are introduced to the protagonist John Caesar (Mammotty) boarding a bus to Bengaluru. His initial conversations with his co-passenger Sunny (Hakkim Shajahan) are in sync with the soon to be explored ‘gaming’ theme of the narrative. Here, Sunny is shown to be an expert gamer while John is a simpleton known to standup for things that are right, a fact that you witness in a complex action sequence on the highway. But, the drama completely goes downhill from this point, something where the narrative structure becomes obscure.

One of the reasons why this narrative structure doesn’t quite work is because the world and the characters are still at a nascent stage, and just not developed enough at that point (when the drama chooses to go into an extended flashback). The flashback is quick (not in a good way) to introduce you to supercop Benjamin (Gautham Vasudev Menon) and his team who are shown to wipe out crime from the city of Kochi. Soon, you are air-dropped into a crime scene, again without a context that isn’t necessarily staged very well. And you are further disconnected from the scene because there are no emotions to back the scene – the figure in question hasn’t been introduced earlier that doesn’t allow you to comprehend the impact of the scene in question. This extends also to the immediate next heist that transpires. The context is still not there, something that further dissociates its viewers from the drama. And all of it circled along the one fundamental flaw – its narrative structure (or editing if you may want to call it).

There are a string of events that transpire along its way to the halfway mark that continue to leave you in a state of daze. This includes a non-linear structure that doesn’t allow you to settle into the drama with its characters, and some random sequences including a shootout that unfolds at the halfway mark following an arrest. The little context of a robbery that was being carried out in the past timeline didn’t seem as threatening either because the stakes did not include any human lives. Now just imagine – had the drama followed a proper trajectory with enough context to the drama and its characters at the halfway mark, even a less threatening scenario of a serial robbery would have evoked a sense of intrigue!

The picture gets increasingly clearer in the second hour when the cat and mouse chase begins. But because the stakes are so low, the drama is only reduced to a generic wave of broad strokes, even during a potential setup scene that is engineered for a capture, in the first of the many attempts by Benjamin and his team. It is also shown that John helps Benjamin with the investigation, often decoding the clues at hand. But the flaw remains on the fact that the code being deciphered itself doesn’t feel too complex to the viewers, making the character of the cops look more incompetent than what was previously promised. For instance in a scene, you see John sitting at a cafe only to get a clue about the puzzle that he is deciphering. You literally see him going home to recheck things as opposed to say simply googling about the missing piece of the puzzle, that was designed to be a video game console. The suspension of disbelief is coupled with some glaring loopholes that don’t necessarily come together in the second act of the drama.

And this brings me to the final act that literally felt from another film, a criticism that I also had for the Hindi film Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3 (2024). The writing literally had reserved so many character arcs and the emotional connect towards its characters for the final 30 minutes of the film. Yes, the revelation might be shocking for many but I could literally see this coming from a mile. But that remained least of my issues here. The core motivation of the antagonist was so weak that it never justified the events of the film that transpired. There were either glaring loopholes with respect to the identities of a few characters, or simply fleeting moments of reconstructing some key moments from the screenplay that didn’t exactly work for me. And to top it, even the final face-off was missing to sum up a screenplay that may have worked on paper but was woefully off with its narrative structure that buried a potentially promising thriller!