Chekavar has Indrajith playing Kasinathan, a Brahmin Police Sub Inspector who gets transferred to a notorious thug spot in Cochin. He saves a girl from being raped by Rocky, younger brother of Cochin's most infamous don Raghavan (Kalabhavan Mani), and is in turn asked to marry off his sister (Sarayu) to Rocky. Kasi refuses to relent and fights tooth and nail to save his sister from Rocky's clutches.
As is evident, this is a story that we have heard quite a few times before. The tale of the common man being harassed by the local goonda and turning into a goonda himself is as old Malayalam cinema itself. Chekavar too tells the tale with all the predictable sequences unfolding on screen, one after the other.
For starters. there is Rocky sporting curls and blinking through the little space that he manages to find between them. He sniffs some ominous looking white powder from between his knuckles and expresses his satisfaction through strange grunts. The perfect villain who could give any cop a run for his life.
On the contrary, there is Raghavan who has turned over a new life after getting married and having a daughter who is in her teens right now. He still maintains all that aura that he once enjoyed, but has no idea of turning back to the streets. There is the wife and daughter 24 x 7 behind him as the guardian angels who would keep him away from further filth. He turns around and looks at them and decides that he needs to stay far away from all that he had once been.
Kasi's family on the other hand is as peaceful as ever, with his sister doing her final year MBBS, his fiancé working in a Government office, the mother who is more of a voice that emanates from the kitchen, and the family karanavar who could forever be seen on the arm chair.
The two aspects of the film that do deserve a mention are the musical score and the action direction. The song Poonchillayil, the only one in the film has been impressively composed, and the background score matches up to the mood of the film as well. The action direction does leave a mark as well. The actions sequences, though they involve plenty of exaggerated movements, has been choreographed in an admirable fashion.
Indrajith has proven that he is competent in diverse roles by now, but in Chekavar his roles is reminiscent of a very similar role that he had done in Nayakan. Though he did not play a cop in the film, the latter too was essentially a action drama that had him taking on bigwigs single handedly. The female presence in the film, is felt through Samvrutha and Sarayu, both of which deliver competent performances.
Chekavar doesn't offer anything new when it comes to its central theme. This is a done to death premise that gains no new verve in the hands of the director.
