After last year's mega success of his first film "Keerthichakra", which dealt with the Indian Army's fight against militancy in Jammu and Kashmir and had Mohanlal in the lead role, Major Ravi is back with "Mission 90 Days", about the hunt for former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi's killers.

In "Keerthichakra", the director wove the story around an army operation, in which he had participated himself. However, this time the story deals with the chasing down of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) terrorists who killed Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

Mammootty plays Major Sivaraman, chief of the National Security Guards (NSG) commandos. He is assigned to assist the Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Tamil Nadu Police.

In this film too the director adopts the same method as in "Keerthichakra" - he first establishes the hero and then weaves the story around him.

So, we are introduced to Sivaraman as a daredevil who sets out on the extraordinarily long drive from New Delhi to his home in Kerala, without bothering about the riots on the way. He even puts some civic sense into the traffic police on the way.

As for the investigations, however, it looks as if we are reading the case diary of the officer-in-charge, with detailed depictions of the chase and capture of the culprits, one by one.

The pace of the film is languid, to say the least, with winding dialogues designed to magnify the protagonist's heroism - as apparent in the lines delivered in justification of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) operation in Sri Lanka.

The film works when there is action, but the ample scope for action remains under-utilised. The two-part climax, however, is truly successful.

First, we are shown the events as the hero had envisaged them - capturing Sivarasan and his group alive. Then, we witness a realistic version of the event - bureaucratic interference and a delay of virtually two days that means the team can take away only the terrorists' bodies, as they get time to commit suicide.

Mammootty shines once again in uniform. But his lustrous performance does not prevent the film from proving a bit of a letdown.