Copy Cat Jeethu's NERU caught

Neru starring Mohanlal and doing well in theatres is nothing but a little bit of tinkering of the 1995 movie ` Sketch 2 Hands That See’ is the charge. As with his earlier films starting from Drishyam onwards has been adapting the movies to suit the local audience and bring in elements that are of his own. This makes you puzzled as can it be called a plagiarism or just inspiration. In Neru there is partner to Jeethu and this lady a lawyer by profession is credited with writing the screenplay with him. Coming back to Sketch ,the story is about a blind girl who gets raped. All that the cop has is a sketch of the rapist and that too drawn from what little the blind girl’s touches that she had from the rapist during the act. Cut to Neru – Blind girl is raped in her house and as a sculptor she through what she felt by moving her hands over the rapist is made into a bust. Scene moves to court. The defense lawyer Mohanlal arguments and his difficulty to get the blind girl testimony and bust based observations by the court are similar to Sketch. After this Jeethu brings scenes where the rapist alibi is proved false and the girl’s father being looked as a possible rapist of his own daughter and this is not in Sketch. In Sketch, the rapist is a serial rapist and he leaves no evidence as he beheads the victim. But in case of blind girl, he does not kill her as she cannot testify against him. In Neru, the rapist has a track record of doing a similar crime and getting away as he managed to get evidence to prove that he was not at spot of crime. All this can be given a benefit of doubt or say a clever rewrite of a good plot but the scene where after the favourable verdict , the rape victim runs her fingers over the lawyer’s facial features and comes up with a sketch is ditto in Neru. Jeethu could not resist the temptation to not include this emotion charged scene in his film. Similarity between Jeethu films to Hollywood or other language films has been evident from the days when he made My Boss whose plot is The Proposal and to give due credit he added his own humour scenes .Drishyam plot is Suspect x and Jeethu turns the hero into a cinephile ( in original he was a Maths genius)with strong family bonds and introduces a character of Kalabhavan Shajon . Brillance of Jeethu is in 12th Man which is Perfect Strangers plot or rather the idea. Perfect Strangers is no murder mystery but he turns 12th Man into one. Is it not Brillant ? Leo the biggest blockbuster of Kollywood has a line – Tribute to the History of Violence. Will Jeethu at least give due credit in upcoming Ram ? If there is a plagiarism checker for movies, Jeethu will escape and even from the tools that detect AI content. Critic Bharadwaj Rangam rightly called Neru a writer’s movie/ To improvise on a borrowed plot does need lot of writing skill to shake off the similarity to original.