Payanam is a movie produced by Prakash Raj with a airline hijacking plot as the core of the entire movie. The movie is a good mix of Chuck Norris’ Delta Force, combined with the hijacking of Indian Airlines flight IC814. We have already seen the same story line taken in Hindi movie Zameen and the Malayalam movie Kandahar.
Nagarjuna plays the lead role in this movie and has Prakash Raj playing the role of the chief negotiator. The setting is around Tirupathi Airport, where the hijacked plane is landed and held for a few days until the demands of the hijackers are met.
Inside the plane, the story unfolds – copied as similar as possible to the events that happened on IC 814 in Afghanistan. There is a priest who starts saying all preachings as the story goes along. There is a fun loving guy, who gets killed because he talks too much!
The story has some nice deviations with a local actor brought in to play the role of the terrorist, who is killed by accident on his way from the jail to Tirupathi. There is also a lot of comedy happening along with the director and the make up man, trying to assist this local actor in acting like the terrorist.
The climax is supposed to be very serious and is in fact taken in a nice way. At the end it all becomes a joke, with all the terrorists killed as they try to go from one plane to another. It is so funny when Nagarjuna kills the last hijacker with a single bullet after running 30 meters straight towards him and finally shoots when he is about two meters away from the hijacker! He must be a trained sniper 🙂
It is one of the very few Indian movies which does not have a designated heroine in the movie. I also do not remember seeing any songs in the movie – overall it was quite different in these two aspects. If they had not copied the IC814 story and come up with something original, it might have been a little more attractive.
I also noticed that in every hijacking everyone starts talking about Stockholm Syndrome more often now a days. The Stockholm event happened in 1972 and is a long gone story, but I guess people are realizing the pattern of behaviour even today in many of these hijacking dramas.
Overall, Payanam – can be watched once, but not worth watching unless it comes your way!
நல்ல படங்கள் சில சமயம் சிறு சிறு குறைகளோடு வருவதுண்டு. அதை(குறைகளை) கண்டுகொள்ளாமல் விட்டு விடலாமே. நான் இன்னும் படம் பார்கவில்லை. பார்த்தபின்பு மற்ற கருத்துக்களை கூறுகிறேன்.