Anjaneyulu and Ravi Teja are made for each other. Only he can excel in playing a loser (bad at academics, unemployed, broke and hopelessly in love, all at the same time) with attitude dripping in every sentence. His current offering has cracker one-liners sprinkled throughout the movie. It feels like eating biryani with crispy rice fritters. Except, that the rice fritters taste best.
The first half, until Anjaneyulu begins the cat and mouse game with the baddies, is pretty good. Loads of laughs, entertainment, naach-gaana and rousing one-liners. When a gory fight is on, he announces that "all the parts of the body have individual brains and therefore will act on their own!", and other such are whistle-worthy gems. Elsewhere, Anjaneyulu, even declares, "Naa Laanti Vaadnni Chooddam Veru, Nannu Chooddam Veru" roughly translated as Seeing someboby like me is not the same as seeing me, mind it!"
Post-interval, it is mostly full of punching people in their solar plexus, snapping out their small intestines, smashing up the skull, twisting the tongue and other such morbid activities. At one point, he even threatens to pull out the epiglottis of a man thereby pulling out the entire network of intestines in the stomach out in one go. Little wonder, the film has got an ‘A’ rating.
The sudden inane duets and the abrupt item number just add to the confusion. But, there is a rhythm to this too. Five minutes of furious monologues by Ravi Teja, two minutes of romance with Nayanthara, three minute of a song sequence, eight minutes of stunts and then the whole circus plays out all over again.
The movie ends with Anjaneyulu bumping off everyone who has been involved in his parents death. To find out the real story, he joins as one of the apprentice goons in Bada’s gang. There are (actually) some light comic moments here.
It’s also about smart branding and taking a dig at rivals. Anjaneyulu works for HMTV, a news channel in Hyderabad and half the screen time is used for its branding. While showing the inside story about how stories and news makes it into the headlines, HMTV generously takes dig at another channel (presumably Maa TV) throughout.
Director Parasuram pays a tribute to Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan, an IAS turned politician in Hyderabad who founded the Lok Satta party, openly in it. Nice way to air one’s views, one must say!
Parasuram shows flashes of brilliance and inspiration from his mentor Puri Jagannath. Like the hero playing a goon for the larger good of the society, his lover asking him to stop this nonsense if he really loves her and a few such other typical scenes. The first half is still a fun ride and the second is loaded with so much violence and beating about that there is no time left to narrate anything else. However, it takes guts to make fun of the film fraternity and how so many movies actually bite the dust but are hyped as hits. The scene with a flop director doing a live show to talk about his success is hilarious to say the least. However, the tragedy song and the long scenes with the dead bodies should have been chopped off like the hands of the baddies when Ravi Teja fights them.
Nayanthara looks a size -5. Much, much lesser than size zero, though we don’t know why she had to look so anorexic, considering she just plays a telecaller working with Airtel and not an aspiring model or actress. She sports a greasy, no-make up look throughout with a nose stud. But in the duets, she suddenly has loads of blue and purple eye blush and ends up looking like a junkie. The idea might have been to introduce a new trend but it just doesn’t gel with the movie. The only time she looks cute is in a song where she wears a pink mini and sports a hat. In the beginning, she doesn’t take to Anjaneyulu and frequently chases him away but suddenly she starts showing affection. How come? She has precisely two dialogues with Ravi Teja every half hour or so and it leads to a song. So that works out to exactly about ten minutes of dialogue presence and say, another ten minutes of song presence.
Thaman’s music was a hit in Kick but none of the songs register in this movie. The title number is a peppy one and another melody shot abroad also sounds okay. The item song with Kim Sharma is where the movie hits rock bottom - half-nude bodies, strobe lights, blinding flashes, chaos and cacophony for music.
And last but not the least - Ravi Teja! He simply does what he is best at and nobody complains. He looks lean, toned up and younger too! It would be almost impossible for him now to play any other role barring the loser with attitude. And surprisingly, he is a winner each and every time he has played a loser! His one liners are spicy and heady – like Martini shots. The wise just enjoy his dialogues and walk out. The ones who sit through and complain are otherwise!
