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.
An edited version of this piece can be found here.
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