‘Check’ before you venture out to watch

The Nithiin-starrer revolves around terrorism, chess and mind games

Check it out before you brave the new challenges and make it to the theatres. Check the genre and the whispers about the film. You surely need more than the ordinary reason to buy yourself a ticket in the ‘new-normal’. I guess the filmmaker has a healthy repute in Telugu industry. How does one ‘sanitise’ oneself from the Telugu cinema produce?

The OTT platforms have offered an amazing a-la carte and sooner than later even the addict will fight the addiction. The addiction of stars doing impossible bashing up the baddies. Please, pleads a script of a victim falsely accused of terrorism and with the natural gift to playing mind games. So, the victim is out to get the better of the biggest contemporary crime (terrorism) with the most tried instrument (the sharp human mind). The dye is cast. Unfortunately, the plot is lost. Lost beyond redemption.

---

Like the promos (for the tobacco prohibition) where the victim laments about having everything going her way till the addiction got the better of her, the script falls in the template potholes of our manufacturing units. As one induced to playing chess in jail by colleague Sathyanarayana (Sai Chand), our hero Aditya (Nithiin) is now en route to fame and the hope that he would find the real map to his being falsely implicated in the terror attack which found 40- odd victims. He nails it with a flashback pointing to one song appearing Yatra (Priya Prakash Varrier).

Lady lawyer Manasa (Rakul Preet Singh) makes the most half-hearted attempt to save her client. While her dad (Posani) encourages her to take on the brief to ensure fame and she is dead pan, the guy has a doomed future akin to that of the viewer. Stereotypes like a bad prisoner (Rohit Pathak), good cop Karunakar (Murli Sharma), comedian, bad cop (Sampath Raj) — all join in to make a hash of the party.

The climax is insipid. It is also very unconvincing. Inspired by western interpretation like Shawshank Redemption, the film loiters into the irrelevant and is a huge disappointment for the Nithiin fan. Nithiin has zealously made for himself a niche which comes down crumbling. Marketed as a new twist to his career, this is a move he would do well to retrieve with speed.

Even in the carcass of a tale, he leaves a few endearing moments. Your heart goes out to him. Everyone else in the cast find a perfect alibi in a logic-defying dead pan script. The first person who seems to have taken the quit route is the editor and resultantly you have over 140 minutes.

When a top-notch actor like Sampath goes over the top you know that you need to check your steps.

---

Now you can get handpicked stories from Telangana Today on Telegram everyday. Click the link to subscribe.
Click to follow Telangana Today Facebook page and Twitter .

---