Mammootty & Mohanlal Together Again — And Patriot Delivers

Patriot Movie Review: Mammootty Is Magnetic in Mahesh Narayanan’s Surveillance Thriller

There’s a specific kind of electricity in a Malayalam film industry that knows it’s operating at full voltage. Patriot — with Mammootty, Mohanlal, Fahadh Faasil, Nayanthara, and Kunchacko Boban under one roof — carries that charge from the opening frame. The question, of course, was never whether it would be watchable. It was whether it could possibly live up to what we’d all already built in our heads.

Mostly? It does. And that itself is no small feat.

Director Mahesh Narayanan has spoken openly about his love for the IV Sasi–T Damodaran school of Malayalam cinema — those perfectly engineered commercial hits of the 1980s, films like Ee Nadu (1982), that tackled corrupt politicians and social rot without ever softening the blow. Patriot is Narayanan’s attempt to do something similar fifty years later. The enemy isn’t a factory belching smoke or a landlord with a lathi. The enemy now is invisible — it lives in your phone.

When Data Becomes the New Villain

Patriot is built around a fictional spyware application called Periscope — a barely disguised stand-in for Pegasus, the Israeli surveillance tool that caused a political storm globally just a few years ago. The film sets up Periscope’s mechanics with crisp economy: you understand within minutes how an app installed on a few powerful phones cascades downward until it poisons everything and everyone connected to them. Narayanan treats its spread like a contagion. A flesh-eating virus, not a digital inconvenience.

The corrupt politician steering this surveillance state is played by Rajeev Menon, and his equally corrupt son Sakthi — a nepo-kid with a glass-building empire and all the moral depth of a loading screen — is played by Fahadh Faasil in full villain mode. Their corporation looks exactly like you’d imagine: all steel and screens, employees who seem decorative. The writing, though, is sharper than their aesthetic. The father-son dynamic between Menon and Faasil has a complex, occasionally surprising texture that keeps you from writing them off as cardboard heavies.

Mammootty’s Dr. Daniel Is the Film’s Cool, Complicated Heart

Mammootty’s Dr. Daniel is introduced exactly as you’d want him: charismatic, a little world-weary, and carrying just enough of a drinking problem to make you trust that he’s seen things. He’s been pulled back in — reluctantly — to investigate and dismantle Periscope. Once the film pivots into a fugitive thriller, Dr. Daniel hopscotches across countries not for the spectacle of it but because the plot demands asylum, literally. It’s a smart choice, and Mammootty makes every country feel like an extension of the same pressure cooker.

Here’s the thing — Narayanan clearly never lost sight of what made him such a compelling filmmaker with C U Soon (2020). That film was set almost entirely on screens, and the best scenes in Patriot have the same DNA. The world being surveilled is shown through the act of surveilling: multiple eyeballs hunting Daniel across feeds and terminals, with the film’s editing mirroring that fractured anxiety.

Mohanlal, Morse Code, and a Masterstroke of Writing

And then Mohanlal arrives. The brawn to Mammootty’s brain — though that framing undersells the intelligence of his character’s role. The introduction scene is clever in the way only genuinely confident filmmaking is: the two legends communicate in Morse code, deliberately bypassing the tech-obsessed antagonists who can’t look beyond their monitors. It’s retro, it’s witty, and it lands with a warmth that no amount of CGI spectacle could manufacture. Every joke about “two veterans” suddenly feels like a wink aimed directly at the audience.

That’s also the film’s larger emotional trick. It keeps earning its sentimentality by grounding it in specificity. Darshana Rajendran’s character Jyoti gets a backstory delivered as a montage — brilliantly edited, tracing her entire arc from normalcy to trap to capture — that does more for the film’s message about privacy than any monologue could. By the time you understand what happened to her, you don’t need an explanation. You feel it.

Where Patriot Stumbles — and Why It Still Wins

No film juggling this many threads, characters, and technical concepts over 180 minutes gets through clean. Patriot has patches — mainly expository sections where it can’t quite figure out how to show rather than tell. There’s a verbosity that creeps in occasionally, the weight of a story that has too much to explain and not always the visual language to let the explanation breathe.

The action set-pieces are the other sticking point. Each one sounds extraordinary on paper — high-concept, carefully written into the screenplay. But on screen, they don’t fully land. The gap between the ideas and their execution is narrow but noticeable, especially in a film this precise everywhere else.

And yet. Sushin Shyam’s score knows exactly when to underline and when to disappear. An early scene inside a fighter jet pays off beautifully near the film’s end, recontextualising a character’s motivations in a way you genuinely didn’t see coming. Kunchacko Boban and Nayanthara get room — not token appearances, not afterthoughts. The dignity the writing affords every character here is, frankly, rarer than it should be.

The Verdict: A Whistleblower Thriller That Earns Its Whistles

Patriot is not a perfect film. It’s a film that wanted to be great and landed — with considerable style — at something just below that. Which, when you consider the ambition of a Mammootty-Mohanlal reunion with a socially urgent surveillance narrative, is still a significant achievement.

Mahesh Narayanan set out to make the kind of Malayalam commercial cinema that T Damodaran and IV Sasi mastered — films that could thrill you and trouble you in the same breath. He’s largely done it. Patriot doesn’t just have whistle-worthy moments. It has unforgettable ones.

FAQ SECTION

Q: Is Patriot worth watching in theatres?
A: Yes, Patriot is best experienced in theatres. The surveillance thriller starring Mammootty and Mohanlal runs 180 minutes and delivers enough tension, craft, and star power to justify the big screen — despite minor pacing issues in expository sections.

Q: What is Periscope in the film Patriot?
A: Periscope is the fictional spyware application at the centre of Patriot‘s plot. It functions as a stand-in for Pegasus, the real-world Israeli surveillance software, and the film traces how its installation on a few powerful phones eventually affects ordinary citizens.

Q: Who plays the villain in Patriot (2026)?
A: Fahadh Faasil plays Sakthi, the corrupt nepo-kid antagonist, while Rajeev Menon portrays his equally corrupt politician father. Together, they run the surveillance corporation driving the film’s central conflict.

Q: How is Mohanlal’s role in Patriot?
A: Mohanlal plays a key supporting role — the physical counterpart to Mammootty’s cerebral Dr. Daniel. His introduction scene, where the two legends communicate via Morse code to outwit tech-savvy villains, is one of the film’s most celebrated moments.

Q: Is Patriot based on a true story or real events?
A: Patriot is fictional, but draws clear inspiration from real-world surveillance controversies, particularly the Pegasus spyware scandal. The film’s spyware app Periscope is a thinly veiled reference to Pegasus, which became a global controversy when its use for political surveillance was exposed.

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