India, March 27 -- It had been 45 minutes by the watch since L2: Empuraan's opening scene (I know because I checked), and Mohanlal - the titular messiah - had not entered the storyline. I may be old-school but I like the heroes of my mass action movies to arrive a lot earlier than the interval. But then Empuraan isn't your run-of-the-mill mass masala film. It comes from God's own country - where cinema is still alive. The attempt here is to marry the finesse of Malayalam cinema with the big-ticket experience of mass cinema. These are the director's own words. Yet, what happens in the end is a film grappling with an identity crisis, an overlong runtime, and a confused mess of a script. The mass moments and action save the day, but barely. ...