VBVR: Incoherent and amatEURISH

Debutante Indrasena R attempts to be different right from the beginning of this action drama. He has an English song playing out as the opening titles roll out, with scratchy footages of war and animal kingdom action as a backdrop. There are shady characters with guns and evil intentions and goons doing what they know best – kidnap, rape and kill young girls. Following these blood letting scenes are those where bodies fall one after the other in a heap, the assassin shown wearing a hood.

As one resigns oneself to watching a standard Telugu style, English-film inspired crime film, the glocal ambitions of the director makes him take off at an international level when the audience is made aware of a plane kidnap, which suddenly disappears from every available tracking mechanism. Hence, we have two (or is three?) story tracks running parallel for the first hour, which is distracting, if not irritating as the intermission is announced. By then all the main characters – all of them cops – Sudheer Babu, Nara Rohit and a stylish Shriya Saran, playing a svelte policewoman, smoking away furiously- are as helpless as the audience.

Enters the ringleader who makes it all happen – Sri Vishnu – with a mohawk hairstyle and tattoos like Ghajini Suriya all over his upper body. He makes the investigating team dance to his tune, which is making them do his bidding of killing criminals as, you have guessed right, the plane passengers as his hostages.

By avoiding romantic liaisons between the lead pair and not indulging in any sizzler item songs, the action is monotonously stuck to amateurish investigations by the senior team with Nara Rohit seen in a bandaged arm all through. Sudheer Babu has his bumbling constables for comic relief which does not work throughout the film. As it all ends, one is worried why should the film lovers be subject to such bizarre experiments in the name of creating cults when straight, linear storytelling in any genre would have worked for raising the bar as far as Telugu cinema goes.