A Kabbadi player rescues a young woman from an unwanted marriage and hides her in his home. The main drama is set in Hyderabad. For this purpose, a huge and expensive set against Charminar backdrop was erected. Hero Ajay (Mahesh Babu) lives in one of the houses there. He has his own entry into the house, through a trap door, to avoid being noticed by his disciplinarian police officer father (Mukhesh Rishi) and mischievous younger sister (Niharika). His mother (Geetha) is kind and affectionate. Ajay is a kabaddi champion and goes to Kurnool to take part in a tournament. He meets Swapna (Bhoomika Chawla) and rescues her from the clutches of Obul Reddy (Prakash Raj). He then brings her to Hyderabad and takes her to his room through the trap door. And she continues to stay there without anyone's knowledge, blending among the many dolls in his room whenever anyone comes visiting Ajay. Ajay's priorities now are to get a passport and visa for Swapna so that she can move away to the US and then to win the national Kabaddi title for his team. He wins the title but fails to send her abroad, as Swapna refuses to leave him and go. How she becomes completely free of Obul Reddy to be with Ajay forms the rest of the story. One of the films that took the tollywood industry by surprise… Everything in the film were almost perfect and one can also go on to say that it was FLAWLESS..! The music was good and the background score was simply great..Everybody got what they wanted..! The main thing that became an asset to the film was the way in which the director lead the film..the screenplay was awesome because it always kept the viewers guessing on what is going to happen next..! So overall a superb film and a good career boost for MAHESH..! Some of the music tracks that I found were foot tapping were Hare rama Hare Krishna and the melodies Nuvve Maya chesavo kani and Nuvve Maya chesavo kani ila ee kshanam agiponi took the viewers into a trance..! The climax scene were the Hero finally delivers a killer blow is one of the best scenes ever shot until then..! The most enjoyable Telugu film I have seen till date. This film does not try to force any message down our throat, or does not even try to be profound. It chooses a one-line straightforward story line and sticks with it till the end. That is the film's biggest strength : it is uncomplicated. It stays true to all the classical conventions of melodrama. There is a hero who is courageous, a heroine who is in trouble and needs to be saved, and a villain who is downright evil and obsessed about the heroine. These archetypes never waver during the course of the film. The hero has no deeper agenda to push other than helping a fellow person in distress and never falters in his self-imposed mission, the heroine is always weepy and surrounded by trouble until the hero's heroics instill a sense of confidence enough for her to grow some balls (metaphorically speaking, of course) and openly challenge the villain to prove his machismo to her by defeating the hero, and the villain never undergoes the slightest change of heart over anything. This single-minded focus on keeping things simple and yet highly engaging is where Gunasekhar and team achieve a victory.<br/><br/>Moving beyond the basic story, there's a lot to admire in the screenplay and direction. Gunasekhar loves overhead camera shots and uses them skillfully - whether it be in the opening scene where the hero is surrounded in a circle by the members of a rival street gang who are later upstaged by the hero's friends who surround them in an even bigger circle, or the same shot repeated in a different setting yet similar context when the villain surrounds the hero with his gang of henchmen, only to be upstaged again by the hero's gang.<br/><br/>Gunasekhar also banishes the achilles' heel of far too many south Indian films - the mandatory presence of a comic relief subplot. Instead, he utilises the time to build the portrait of the hero's caring family, with every member getting the due attention. The hero has a tendency to get into trouble with rival gangs, but he is also a dutiful son who helps his mother in kitchen. His father is a police officer who is obviously worried about his son and even angry at him at times, but their relationship never gets overly antagonistic as it could have been had the writer tried to resort on tried-and-tested character building tricks. In fact, it is interesting to look at the families of the three main archetypal characters - the hero's family is near-perfect, the heroine's family may be ravaged due to the villain's overtures but still hasn't collapsed, and the villain's family is quite unique : his mother, played with a great sense of joy and forcefulness by Telangana Sakuntala, is an extremely formidable and domineering woman who looks like she might exceed even her son in villainy. She loves to smoke cigars - cigars, mind you, not those puny cigarettes - , chomp on green chillies and always has a faithful dog right beside her.<br/><br/>This is the best Mahesh Babu performance I have seen till date. He is a one-note actor and he suits this mostly one-note character very well. He does not make a good anti-hero like he played in Pokiri. He should stick to characters like these. Bhoomika Chawla is rather annoying with her constantly weepy expression in the first two acts but as I have written above, does change her mannerisms for the better in the last third. Prakash Raj is good as usual. He has played similar characters so many times that it might give a deja vu feeling, but this film was where his reign as the top villain in south cinema started originally.<br/><br/>RECOMMENDED.
Phyberd replied
344 weeks ago