Ra Ra Krishnayya
extends the legacy of freemakes or unofficial remakes in Tollywood. The main
plot and most of the scenes are borrowed from Riteish Deshmukh – Genelia
starrer Tere Naal Love Ho Gaya, which in turn is an adaptation of a
Danny Boyle Rom-Com fantasy A Life Less Ordinary. Good that the Hindi
and Telugu versions didn’t induce the fantasy aspect of the original. Now, you
can’t simply remake a Hindi film into Telugu, you need to customize it according
to the tastes of local audience. Just here, the film misfires giving a déjà vu
of many films that adorned this land. Even after such effort, it contains a lot
of Bollywood flavor throwing the viewers in a ‘disconnect’ mode.
Krishna / Kittu (Sundeep
Kishan) is a cab driver in Chennai. Though they said Chennai, every location
seemed like a studio construction and most of the outdoor shoot happened in
Hyderabad. Kittu wants to grow big in life by starting a car rental service of
his own. He approaches his owner Manikyam (Tanikella Bharani) – again a guy
with an irritating Tamil accent – to get back his savings of 6 lakhs, which the
latter denies to give. Now with a fit of rage, Kittu accidentally kidnaps
Manikyam’s daughter Nandeeswari (Regina). She enjoys Kittu’s company as she is
unhappy with her father’s decision to marry her to a buffoon. Kittu and
Nandiswari travel together and plunge into some tricky situations to leave a
little scope for so called twists.
All through the first half,
director Mahesh forcefully paints an Imtiaz Ali tinge to the happenings. A
deliberate attempt to make it a Road film goes haywire. Of course, you can’t
make a Jab We Met or a Highway with this kind of set up. So, it
ends up as a domineering girl who takes control of the situation where the
kidnapper has nothing much to do rather than follow her instructions. One can
clearly call Regina as the hero in the first half. And when the movie slides
into the second half, it’s all Jagapathi Babu who dons an avatar of a comedian.
Although it didn’t suit him to the core, he manages to pull off few gags. So he
can be called the hero there.
Now the question is… What
happened to hero Sundeep? He couldn’t make his presence felt in even one scene.
The director tries a new format of story-telling wherein he rolls serious and
silly tone in once scene. Sundeep tried to lighten such scenes, but every time
the heroine or the supporting cast took away the brownie points. After a hit
like Venkatadri Express, it’s unpalatable to see this young hero in a
caricatured role which holds no promise or surprise.
Music by Achu is getting
bland with each passing film. He uses one track, with slight tweaking, for
every scene – comedy, emotion, chase et al. The way the songs are recorded
makes you go deaf for the vocals. The camera work was experimental though, as
most of the shots were taken from different angles. This was another saving
grace along with the actress Regina, who was vivacious with a worldly charm.
Ra Ra Krishnayya
is an unimaginative, shoddy rehash where everything is force fed to the
audience. Every character comes for a sojourn making the journey aimless. The
entire Kerala episode is blown out of proportion. The film is loaded with many
unanswered questions and in this wafer-thin plot you can never find logic. If
the director wants us to buy such a concept, then we have much better options.
Or simply, we can watch a Ready or a Mirchi on DVD.
My Rating: Expectation - 6/10, Reality - 3/10
This review was originally written for Metro India newspaper.
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