Movie Review: Krack in different bottle but Khiladi brings crowds to theatres

Hyderabad: Ravi Teja, the insurance to high voltage action defying not just Physics and logic but also the pandemic ensures a huge turn out in the theatres as the city attempts to return to normal.

Full throated and with a no-hold-bar grammar of director Ramesh Varma, Khiladi play smart is just what one expects in two and a half hours with Ravi Teja in acting.

Only it takes over 45 minutes to get the narrative in place. The romance between Mohan Gandhi (Ravi Teja) and Chitra (Dimple Hayati) takes too long and is lackluster. To give it a context, Mohan Gandhi is the foster son of affluent Rajashekar (Rao Ramesh) and is completely attached to his family. In contrasting style to their meat and liquor lifestyle is Puttaparti (Murali Sharma), his wife Chandrakala (Anasuya Bharadwaj) and their daughter Chitra is smitten by the love bug.

Now coming to the story, BalaSingham (Nikitin Dheer) arranges 10,000 crores for dad Guru Singham (Mukesh Rishi) to move from Home Minister to Chief Minister. The police headed by Arjun Bhardwaj (Arjun Sarja) are on trail. The film sees Gandhi in hail for murdering his parents-in-law and wife. He is the guy who knows about the booty but has Guru Singham, Arjun and the new arrival villain David (Thakur Anoop Singh) bidding for the booty.

Khiladi is Abbas Mastan in Tollywood. It is becoming increasingly difficult to portray straight characters who are commonplace. The promos will tell you that this is Ravi Teja with a vengeance – out to claim the title of Khiladi – no holds bar. His genre in itself is grotesque.

In the cast, the two heroines Dimple Hayati and Meenakshi Chaudary bring neither creativity nor glamour to their presence. Rao Ramesh, as ever, is credible but makes an early exit. Vennela Kishore and his brand of comedy is woefully hackneyed. There is Arjun as the Inspector fighting hard to give his long but poorly etched role some credibility.

Yet again and not surprisingly the film is what Ravi Teja makes out of it. Trimmer than in his earlier outing, he too seems a tad out of sync with interpreting his often repeated larger than screen life. He too takes a bit of a while to get into the skin of his action avatar.

From a template view point, Khiladi is hardly different from Krack except that the evil curves are slimier. View from the Ravi Teja telescope, the angles are all the same.

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