Story:Venkatesh and Mahesh Babu are brothers who have different mentalities. Their father Prakash Raj brings them up with good values and just lets them be what they are. Parallel to his views is character of Rao Ramesh who believes the father and sons don’t know how to adapt to the modern day sensibilities and are still living with old values.
How in the end the good, old school values of father Prakash Raj win over everyone else is the basic storyline of the film.
Performances:Venkatesh as big brother has a very difficult role to play here. It is difficult because it is mostly one dimensional character and remains one till the almost the very end. It isn’t that colorful character that makes one fall in love with it, instead it is the kind of character that makes one get irritated with him after a point and hence it’s a difficult job for any actor let alone Venkatesh to do the role. He must be commended for taking the role and doing justice to it. His performance before interval and in few scenes post interval is a proof of his controlled but well calculated performance.
Mahesh Babu is easily the highlight of the film. His character in the film is such that it is easy to fall in love or like his character even if he just delivers his lines with good timing. Here he does a great job with the timing aspect and every time he is onscreen he lightens up the screen. There is nothing to dislike in this character, it’s so well written and instantaneously likable.
Prakash Raj too has a one dimensional character very much like Venkatesh. He too like Venkatesh uses all his experience and despite being one dimensional character the actor gives depth to it. In the climax the actor shows his class with a simple scene that is emotionally very engaging and yet not hammering the audiences.
Anjali is the next on the list as far as performances go. She has a naïve character that has her own worldview. She overacts most of the time and her voice gets irritating too at times but still her character makes the right impact at the crucial times.
Rao Ramesh has a small but very pivotal role in the film. He is the oppositional moralistic force who can be almost taken as the negative character that has to be defeated. He pitches the character well and leaves the desired impact.
Finally Samantha is just there to provide the glamour quotient. Her role doesn’t have anything memorable apart from few combined scenes with Mahesh Babu.
Jayasudha, Kota Srinivas Rao, Tanikella Bharani, Ravi Babu etc have decent roles and do their work in a routine fashion.
Positives:
Mahesh Babu’s performance
Combined scenes of Mahesh Babu and Venkatesh
Few scenes featuring the pair of Mahesh Babu and Samantha
The positive message
Negatives:
Everything else
Analysis:The film begins slowly by introducing all the characters one by one doing their daily routine and picks up pace, albeit little bit, with the introduction of Mahesh Babu’s character. He brings energy into the narrative with his presence. And it’s good till the interval.
Post interval the tempo is maintained well till the first song is over but after the completion of the song the graph of the film completely nosedives. Especially there is a song in this half featuring Venkatesh and Anjali which is completely unnecessary and looks forced, very clearly. The film then finally shows some moments of spark in the climax with Prakash Raj telling his sons about his values and subsequent realization of the sons of their misunderstandings.
Director Srikanth Addala who also provides the screenplay and dialogues succeeds very well as the dialog writer but fails on the screenplay front which is very inconsistent. However credit must be given to the director for extracting nice performances from the principle cast of the film.
Music for the film by Mickey J Mayer is alright with title song being the best. Background music by Mani Sharma too is very good and it gives the right feel when required. However there are large portions of film where there is a complete silence and this should have been handled better.
Cinematography is very good. Editing could have been better. Production values by Dil Raju are neat.
Bottom-line: One man show by Superstar Mahesh Babu
Rating: 3.25/5
