Plot Summary – Violence erupts between red sandalwood smugglers and the police charged with bringing down their organisation in the Seshachalam forests of South India.

Original Language – Telugu

★½ 

Watched on 09 Feb 2022

Watched this with a bunch of friends and we all had a pretty similar consensus. Individually, a lot of this film works as individual bits but it struggles to form a cohesive narrative and it’s almost unintelligible at times. We felt the need to pause the movie so many times and just explain what was going on to each other which made this already over-long 3-hour movie feel even longer. It wears its inspirations on its sleeve. It’s trying so hard to be a mix of Vadachennai and KGF but it fails to understand what makes those two movies work so effectively. Maybe I’ve just watched too much good Indian cinema to be impressed by this. Telugu cinema seems to be lagging behind its South Indian counterparts and this film is a stark example. Allu Arjun is one of the saving graces of this film and he makes it watchable. The romantic subplot is so problematic and outdated even though Rashmika is trying her best with the absolute cringe dialogue she’s given. I audibly gasped when Fahaad came on-screen cause I couldn’t believe they’d convinced India’s best actor to play a villain who is introduced 2 hours and 40 minutes into the movie. The ‘climax’ of the film is probably the most bizarre and hilarious aspect of the film. It’s a perfect encapsulation of my issues with the film. It’s trying so hard to be ‘not like other mass movies’ but it misses the point so hard. It’s trying to have this epic clash of egos and have a really symbolic message but it’s handled so hastily and we’re supposed to get invested in this conflict which they spent a grand total of five minutes establishing. The ending is so confusing and some of the ‘pivotal character moments’ had us laughing so much. Also, this movie has WAYYYY too many characters and storylines that are inconsequential to the film. It doesn’t help that they are all written the same way so there is nothing interesting about any of them. The only character that goes through any sort of arc is FaFa’s but too bad he’s only there for 15 minutes. I was so disappointed by Pushpa, despite not expecting much.