A ludicrous chip transplantation

Puri Jagannadh is back with his usual fare – ricocheting gun fire, violent action sequences, heroines who are seen in various stages of undress at exotic locations with hardly anything useful to do and a storyline which is always the same – a combo of politics, criminal characters and corrupt police force.

In a bid to go hi-tech, on the lines of the Bourne Identity types, he marries Hollywood with staple Telugu fare and the outcome is even more unbearable.

'Energy Star' Ram, sporting a funky hairdo and fuzzy beard, screaming out his dialogues in Telangana dialect from beginning to end is the criminal out on a mission and the pivot of the mindless mayhem.

He is framed in a murder case of the Chief Minister (Puneet Issar) and those in the background want him dead at any cost as he goes hunting for them.

Then there is Satya Prakash working for the CBI who also is on the same mission – only that he is done to death before he can get to the climax.

Obviously, both the tracks of the hero and the sincere cop intermingle even as one of the heroines (Nabha Natesh) is sacrificed in the process to pave way for another bimbo, Nidhi Aggarwal, the CBI officer's girlfriend.

Aggarwal is tasked with a ludicrous 'scientific' assignment – of memory transfer in a chip form – from her dead beau to the Dakhani desperado, who calls himself as one person with two memory cards.

Of course, nothing happens smoothly as the hero becomes iSmart Shankar and CBI official alternatingly, while the director packs in dream sequences, Bonalu song etc in the process.

An endless stream of tiresome action blocks, over-the-top dialogue delivery of the hero and the done-to-death formulaic treatment leaves the viewers shaken, making them hard to classify what they had seen – whether it was a sci-fi thriller or the usual superhero monotony which Telugu film industry dishes out by the hundreds year after year.

May be the Hindi film audiences, who have warmly welcomed our films in their dubbed incarnations may make more sense of this disastrous flick. For Puri, the film is merely a chip of the old block.