Laxmi Manchu, a Telugu actress with ample mojo to keep her on the right track, makes a comeback of sorts in this dud of a movie, so awful it could serve as a textbook on how not to make a film. The story is banal, fidgety, and aggravated, like a hooch seller trying to sell off all his content as high-quality wine.
So anxious is the film to score that it forgets to cover its track as it moves forward, leaving a messy trail behind, like someone walking into a home from a muddy pathway.
The writer Diamond Ratna Babu and director Vamsi Krishna Malla serve up a muddle mystery which is neither arresting nor interesting; it is simply annoying and uninvolving. The editing and cinematography are school-level amateur, prowling with predatory curiosity through a plot riddled with dead ends. The splashy, blotchy colours suggest more mayhem than maturity.
The narrative arc is so askew, it feels like a tempest in a bathtub.
The film opens with a shady business tycoon, Balaram Varma (Siddique), exercising his evil tactics on the entire police force. Siddique plays the villain as a bully rather than an evil force. Balaram Varma (don’t miss the North Indian name, suggesting that scummy elements in the South are mostly migrants) will remind you of that bully in your classroom who will steal your lunch even if he is not hungry.
Tracking down the misdemeanours of Balaram is our shero, the cop Daksha (Manchu Laxmi), who wears a single expression throughout. This performance is clearly inspired by Samantha Ruth Prabhu’s deadpan school of acting. Being the producer, Manchu Laxmi could have worked on developing her character, giving it more emotional shape and heft.
Or perhaps the script doesn’t afford luxuries of creative expansion. A fierce inertia grips the proceedings, rendering the theme into a series of clumsily conceived images of violence that are neither coherent nor digestible.
Ruinously, the cop heroine gets no support from other characters. The leading lady’s father, Mohan Babu, plays a professor in psychology who passes instant verdicts on the characters’ mental equilibrium like that tarot reader at a carnival. Playing an underwritten character suffering from a steep sense of self-importance, Mohan Babu adds to the feeling that the writers of this fuzzy film lost the script while holidaying at the producers’ expense.
Somewhere in the middle of the muddle, another female character, Mithila (Chitra Shukla), shows up to warn us of the evils of pharmaceutical products and the pure panacea provided by ayurvedic medicines. By the end of the film, I was not sure what kind of medication would help me get over this experience.
