After ‘North 24 kaatham’, Anil Radhakrishnan Menon is out to play with ‘Sapthamashree Thaskaraha’, displaying his affinity for stutter-causing Sanskritized words along with fine film-making.

Seven thieves, one goal. While you can extend this tagline to make up the whole story, what’s to be seen is how it all unfolds.

The seven thieves get to know each other in jail. All of them have lost something—reputation, family, trust. But it isn’t a dismal story; it puts together events from all the seven lives that affected them in myriad ways and also landed them in jail.

Among the bunch of jailbirds, the quiet one is Krishnanunni (Prithviraj), whose case coincides with that of Noble (Nedumudi Venu) leaving them with a common bad man-to-be-vanquished. And this becomes everybody’s motive for making a master-plan to hit back at the bad man—Pious (Joy Mathews).

What ensues is how they devise plans to get to their goal once they’re released from jail. But why should everybody get involved in two peoples’ personal vengeance? Money is the factor.

The movie isn’t strictly a thriller; it has excellent comedy, some light flirtation with social issues, and elements of a thriller, in ways that one would wonder where the story is leading to.

What’s on display is fine direction, one that doesn’t stray from the main plot; the only problem being, it gets slightly drab when one plan takes so long to be executed, and there aren’t as many hurdles or setbacks as a thriller is expected to have.

As for the story, if it was more layered, since there were a bunch of very interesting ‘thaskaras’, and if the adventures and misadventures were more sporadic, the fun would have multiplied.

An amusing aspect is how the movie has taken a rather serious past, involving murder and death, and placed it in the ‘present’ of the thieves, who aren’t out to avenge themselves by unleashing violence. There’s enough humour to pull the darkness out of the frames.

Although it will make one wonder how a sullen Krishnanunni with a rather painful trail of events that preceded his jail tenure comes to terms with it soon as he’s out. So quickly, that he specifies that he’d only drink milk when a host serves him black tea.

It’s Annamma (Sanusha) who reminds the viewers with her temperament that all’s not hunky-dory and personal woes remain. This might give way to some mixed feelings, but all’s to be forgotten as we wait for more surprises!

Where humour counts, the most effortless performances came from Chemban Vinod and Neeraj Madhav. The Thrissur slang was slapped on aplenty, and Chemban Vinod masterfully handled the role of a small-time thief in Thrissur with his fleeting expressions and fine-tuned intonations.

Neeraj Madhav stirs up quite a ruckus too, as the gullible Brahmin boy, whose livelihood depends on the highly misuse-able video cameras that he makes! The strength of the movie is that it finds good humour even in unlikely places.

Director Lijo Jose Pellissery makes an effective priest, with a role that seems Innocent’s domain of expertise with his quirky brand of comedy, and is impressive. Asif Ali rides an Enfiled and bashes up people intermittently.

Rex Vijayan’s BGM is good for the movie, but it’s been tried and tested way too many times.

The movie has a subdued Prithviraj, and it’s meant to move slowly and cautiously. While the end result brings in much appreciation, the detailing that could have gone into the story-telling is missed.

You sit through this one since you can get a whiff of something big about to happen towards the end, since nothing great happens throughout! As for the thieves, a couple of them do steal your heart for good.