Movie Review - Loukyam (Telugu) - A cringe-worthy cocktail

What’s the difference between film-making and cocktail mixing? In the latter, the mixologists have made mixing drinks an artful endeavor and their adroitness of how to shake, stir and pour churns out a perfect blend. But, alas! This skill goes missing in the film-makers who never think twice to make a film on an age-old template. We can’t even call them ‘an old wine in the new bottle’, ‘leave your brains at home’ etc., as these phrases, like our formulaic films, are getting into the folds of clichés with their repetitive usage.

Yet again our hero Venky (Gopi Chand) is a happy-go-lucky guy who is always there to help and is very effective than any ‘Public Grievance Redressal System’. He helps his friend to runaway with his loved one and, for this valiant act; he earns the wrath of the girl’s family. Let’s call it a Ready or a Rabhasa.

Hero falling in love with villain’s sister can be attributed to a Mass or a Dhee. This time it tilts more towards Dhee as the tone is comical. Wait, our hero asks her to spend a day with him so that he can make her realize his love. The end result arrives in the form of a text message – ‘Hi’. That’s strange. That’s Mass.

Our hero enters the college and tries to woo the girl by pretending as a police officer. This can trace back to a Vishal starrer Malaikottai (Bhayya in Telugu). Not only that, he also learns her hobbies through a friend and makes her dance! Even Gopi Chand’s Ontari had a similar spin-off  And when she realizes that our hero is not what he pretends to be, she asks for an apology and the regular teasing, singing, dancing routine starts. During these episodes, there’s lot of eye candy painted on the screen and Rakul Preet looks drop dead gorgeous. All thanks to her styling, but she needs more meat to her character.

There are many illogical and unwarranted scenes in Loukyam, which do no good for the screenplay rather than offering some throwback to Gopichand’s previous films. May be the writers wanted to pick few good scenes that may work out effectively for this hero and put the audience’s grey cells in active mode. Yes, they need to identify which scene is from which movie. Here, the regular mould of Kona Venkat gets a slight tweaking as the villain and his henchmen visit the hero’s place post interval. That’s a structural reversal. 

Though the entire film looks like a bag of borrowings, the high point of Loukyam comes in the form of comic playoff. Brahmanandam as Sippy and ’30 Years’ Prudvi as ‘Boiling Star’ Babloo pack so much of humor ranging from cheesy, slapstick, situational and lots more. The Legend spoof comes as a relief package towards the end. So, the fact can be reiterated that the comedians can only anchor a movie and keep it afloat amid turbulence. Loukyam also tries to blur the difference between a villain and comedian. This time around, Gopi Chand mellows down the action quotient and stays close to the safe zone of comedy.

Loukyam treads a path where comedy overpowers creativity and peels a layer of irreverence when the hero believes that a journey to a woman’s heart is not through roses or exchanging pleasantries but a tight slap on her face. So, where has all the respect and susceptibility for women gone. Although few bits-and-pieces of comedy and the film’s rich texture drives you to buy this product, a sickening blend of stale ingredients makes it a cringe-worthy cocktail that leaves a bad aftertaste. 

My Rating: Expectation - 6/10; Reality - 4/10

This review was originally written for Metro India newspaper.

Movie Review - Aagadu (Telugu) - Superstar, the showstopper!!

Director Sreenu Vytla has verve about his film-making; rich, buoyant and lion-hearted. For the third time in a row, he gets his hero to don a cop avatar and for some strange reason, police and their rib tickling modus operandi to deal with goons exude a weird allurement. He ensures to make Aagadu grand, potent and obligatory like folklores, which can draw the viewers into them. This time he even goes overboard with his allusions to Ram Gopal Varma!

After chewing some time for the lead character’s childhood episodes and explaining the current status quo, the director gives a hat tip to the Spaghetti Westerns to pull off a dusty entry for the hero, where the latter flashes his towering machismo with a monumental fight sequence amid the dust flying in the air. Like every other film coming out in recent times, Aagadu, too, is based on a masala cliché: a wisecracking yet dead serious cop taking on the evil forces that bring the clouds of gloom to a town. And this template is fleshed out with flavorful Tollywood masala. This time the protagonist wears a new attitude and gives some importance to his sidekick as they set on a hilarious mission.

The plot of Aagadu belongs to a bygone era featuring a messiah of masses and may not figure among those intense cop dramas or thrillers which would drop the jaws or freeze the eyelids. The technicalities are adequate to showcase decent visuals. However, the film emanates gibes and quips, and its use of different slangs for the hero’s character amply accentuates the comic quotient.

Mahesh is a natural charmer stealing the show with his screen presence and immaculate rendition of his lines. Though, at times, I felt he missed a pause or a punctuation here and there. Tamanna makes a comely appearance with her ethnic look. She has a very limited role and is barely visible in the second half. Shruti Hassan sizzles in an inevitable item number. Brahmanandam and M S Narayana put in their parts to good effect. As standalone entities, the former’s comic episodes make you fall off your chair but don’t quite gel well into the narration.

It hurts to frown at this film for the shades of resemblance it leaves around and for the way it does a repetitive act of a hero making a fool out of the comedians and the villains indulging in buffoonery rather than spreading menace all over. The perennial problem with a Sreenu Vytla film is that the main antagonist fails to get registered; same is the case with Aagadu. Just during the wet firecracker kind of a climax, you realize that there’s a villain character (played by Sonu Sood) that needs to be eliminated.

The piece de resistance of Aagadu is the way it draws the contours of irony by trying to overthrow stereotypical constructions staying in a formulaic zone. Albeit Mahesh’s character ridicules the practice of infesting a film with punch lines and one-liners, he indulges in mouthing many of them with remarkable ease. Even though the film lacks a novel storyline and traverses in an archetypal Sreenu Vytla zone, it doesn’t disappoint for there is a vigor that is contagious. 

With just enough comedy and drama to anchor the sweeping spectacle of Superstar Mahesh Babu smashing everyone and everything in sight, Sreenu Vytla’s Aagadu gratifyingly reverberates commercial cinema. To complain that the scenes are overdone and overproduced is to find fault with a kaleidoscope for having too many colors and patterns. That’s what Sreenu Vytla’s cinema is. That’s what Sreenu Vytla cinema needs! 

My Rating: Expectation - 7/10; Reality - 5/10

This review was originally written for Metro India newspaper.
An edited version of this piece can be found here.

Movie Review - Anukshanam (Telugu) - Thriller sans thrills!

Anukshanam was in the news much before its release, not just for the reason it’s another RGV film; but for the innovative pattern of distribution it ventured into. With that, the premise and plot elements were also revealed to an extent. So, the audience expects an intense thriller before walking into the cinema. This concept may sound new on the landscape of Telugu cinema, but has been handled differently and perfectly in other languages, especially the crime thrillers of Malayalam. Then parallels would be rife and how RGV managed to create discretion by holding the bits and pieces of thrills so tautly will make it a cut above the rest.

The movie opens with a psycho killer taking his first victim. Then it runs on the track of a killing spree where the number becomes insurmountable to send enough shivers down the spines of the residents of the city. Gautham (Vishnu) is the special officer in-charge who is on his toes to nab the criminal. Revathi, an NRI who did an extensive research on serial killers comes to his rescue by helping him understand the modus operandi of such people. Together, they try to get close to the killer.

Anukshanam is a rare breed of cinema, where the audience’s preconceived notions get quashed one after the other. Some for good and some go beyond control. The killer’s character is revealed in the first scene, so it’s not another ‘Who done it?’ genre. The killer gets his prey so effortlessly without any resistance, so it’s not a police story where the cops overpower with their heroics. There is zilch of engrossing investigation or ‘connect the dots’ spinoff or finding any traces of vital clues all through the film. A major chunk of the film is dedicated to understanding the background of the softcore individual who turned into a killer, rather than piling more layers of intrigue. Don’t know whether the intention is to send the killer to a rehabilitation centre rather than to a place of confinement.

The characters behave quite differently than required. A journalist always goes with an overblown presentation of cops as spectators and mere caricatures. Revathi’s character brings her personal story to the fore, which is unwarranted. A senior cop gets the information on phone after a gruesome act, and pops up with some flash-in-the-pan moments during press meets. And the behavior of the Home Minister falls on the extremes with his callous nature in this age of media activism. The purpose of Brahmandam’s character still remains a boggling question!

RGV sparkles at places with his technique. There are no unconventional camera angles and the mood and ambience were set up meticulously for the flow of events to seep in. However, the repetitive use of similar sounds for every genre makes it quite jarring. In a typical RGV style, the performances by the central characters are well conceived. Surya as the killer spearheads the film with finesse.

The movie borrows some traces from the films of Davind Fincher and the pre-climax showdown is reminiscent of Se7en. The film’s short runtime and adequate pace may turn into its favour. However, Anukshanam neither stands tall for its substance nor for the sparkling implementation of the written material by the director to create an earth-shattering product. 

My Rating: Expecation - 6/10; Reality - 3/10

This review was originally written for Metro India newspaper.

Movie Review - Power (Telugu) - ‘Power’less string of scrapes!!

There is a clear distinction set for commercial-style cop stories. They have to be loud and darn loud – both in terms of the background score that tries to elevate the scenes and also the uncanny sounds that only find a place in such films. Of course, you can’t imagine listening to thuds and dishums in real life scenarios. Power wanders around this ambit and climbs many notches in rinsing and repeating the formulaic template of a masala entertainer. There’s no harm in dishing out masala, but to what extent is it palatable and how to run a quality check of the ingredients used would be a matter of concern.

Power stays on the fulcrum with Balupu and Vikramarkudu on its extreme ends. In between, there’s a Don Seenu, Julayi, Gentleman, Daruvu, Lakshmi Narasimha et al trying to cling on it to get a perfect balancing act. The film explodes in Kolkata with a high on adrenaline chase sequence chewing loads of aerial footage. Here, Ravi Teja is Baladev Sahay – gutsy yet corrupt police officer. Then the smoke trail leads to another place where a different Ravi Teja flashes in a mass avatar in the form of Tirupathi. Here, he is a wannabe cop and runs from pillar to post to get his dream job. The film shifts between these two characters with interspersing episodes from both the places and an inevitable flashback to fix the motive of the protagonist in a fight between good and evil.

Now, my question is simple. Why do these movies have to be so predictable? Director K S Ravindra joins the bandwagon of writer-turned-directors and stays close to the concoction he churned during his fledgling days. He is reluctant to tamper with a successful streak of mimicking the framing devices such as an honest cop (with a wife and a young kid) at the receiving end, a mother on her death bed, a caricatured heroine who plays a second fiddle in the flashback episode, an officer’s subordinates with a stench of loyalty, and many more to amp up the emotional quotient. In case of Power, we know what’s going to happen in the next, and the next scene. So, we don’t have to wait for a long time for the so called surprises to unfold on the screen. However, one or two so called twists have been handled well.

Power is a strange regression in the context of a cop-versus-politician kind of themes. There are some tokenistic attempts at making the hero a larger-than-life colossus. As ACP Baladev Sahay, Ravi Teja is comical and brooding. He mixes both the shades to surface the expressions archetypal of a cop with an ulterior motive. As Tirupathi, he chuckles and crackles to the core by reprising his acts from Khatarnaak and Kick. He along with Brahmanandam tries to stir a laugh riot but fails to pull off a Krishna-esque act. Even those few comic spin-offs are clasped in a cocoon of Balupu.

There is an ample scope to do things right with more research put into the script, but the makers paid no heed to it. Instead they have resorted to a big hero, colorful songs and old masala tropes to fill the film’s palette. Though the characters belong to multiple geographies, the diversity never seeps into - the story’s texture. The entire Kolkata episode with Telugu speaking people seems like one that’s shot locally and offers no justification. There are overt references to the uniform reminding the police force of their duty, but the hero puts you in a confused mode by wearing both white and khakhi clothes alternately.  All these make Power a powerless string of scrapes that hinge on the template of a routine cop drama. 

My Rating: Expectation - 6/10; Reality - 4/10

This review was originally written for Metro India newspaper.

Movie Review - Weekend Love (Telugu) - Routine yet refreshing!!

You walk into the cinema with very low expectations, and the experience slowly turns out to be a bagful of surprises. Then you try to cherish every bit of it and pat on your back for your luck. But this effect becomes fleeting, and as film inches towards the interval you mellow down your expectations. Then again the film rises like a high tide, giving a flight to your imagination, and switching between a smooth and a turbulent sail to reach its climactic shore. This experience can be summed up in a phrase for a film’s title called Weekend Love.

The film is an assimilation of many stories that form the bone of contention for today’s youth as well as their parents. Amid all these, director Nagu Gavara manages to cook a fine broth of a love story – an archaic one set in a modern IT ecosystem. Ganesh (Adith) is a believer of casual flings and Sandhya (Supriya) is inclined towards relationships that stay from here till eternity. These two contrasting characters are colleagues in a software company. How they fall for each other and how Sandhya becomes a catalyst for change in Ganesh’s attitude towards life forms the rest of the story.

There’s a clear-cut demarcation between a love story and a moralizing love story. We have witnessed many films that revolved around both the genres. Weekend Love just tries to do a balancing act between the two. The outsider’s perception of software industry and its work culture has been elevated to next level and at the same time few myths got quashed. The major chunk of the film is laced with situational comedy and the quirky characters bring the house down.

Adith marks the arrival of another commercial hero; he also says that funnily in a scene. His dances and fights perfectly fit the bill and he shows a lot of promise for an actor who is one movie old in Telugu. He is in his elements and is the force behind the film. All through the film, Supriya struggles to fix the right emotions. She tries to look her character by wearing ethnic wear, albeit with low necklines. There’s a clear miss of a charm that defines her fragile nature. The supporting cast gets its part right with clearly etched roles.

Weekend Love also has its share of shortcomings. The scenes are so much stretched that you bleed from boredom to watch the inevitable unfold on screen. You want to count the minutes a bit faster to reach to the next scene. The age old tactic of a conflict resolution mechanism has been used to full force, thus opening the faucets of tears. Many such old school ways of film-making transform this seemingly fresh tale of love into a string of stale additives. However, the justification to every character with a proper arc makes this film a borderline preachy yet perfect presentation of a story that’s ridden with attitudes and behavioral traits of the present generation and ways to mend them before the imminent damage. Here, the writer-director tugs at your heart strings with his incisive dialogue.   

My Rating: 2.5 /5

This review was originally written for Metro India newspaper.