Mass Jathara review: Ravi Teja’s film is defiantly outdated

Ravi Teja plays Lakshman Bheri, the said railway cop, who is posted to a place named Adavivanam to assume control of its modest railway station, but he soon gathers that the town is a hotbed for marijuana cultivation and smuggling. There’s a nexus of sorts connecting the region with other parts of the country, and while Shivudu (Naveen Chandra) runs it locally as the tyrant, he too is answerable to the bigger shark named Patro from Kolkata.

The whole of Adavivaram, including the other cops, is neck deep in this business, but Bheri’s jurisdiction allows him almost no wiggle room to wield power. If you look at this prospect from afar, you will find the fleeting promise of an exciting setup that requires Bheri to lure all the dirty players to his territory, to his corner that is the railway station, to topple the empire. However, Mass Jathara is so steeped in its own fluff that it barely tries to deliver on that promise, squandering any opportunity to entertain its audience.

At the pretext of a compelling back story for its protagonist, it musters a series of unfunny gags about his life as an ageing, luckless bachelor. In the place of emotional stakes, it introduces his overbearing grandfather (played by Rajendra Prasad, only 12 years older than his on-screen grandson), who is also unnecessarily randy. The villain, Shivudu, is barbaric in the most predictable way, his savagery and sadism so on the nose that they practically drip off like slime.

Sreeleela’s Tulasi is also employed as the romance or the comic relief, but in practice, she stumbles into the picture in a way that significantly derails the narrative. One of the pivotal scenes has Shivudu vowing to kill and sacrifice Lakshman in a matter of a week, but the film abruptly shifts to a couple of incredibly redundant “cutesy” scenes between the two leads (including a dance number), highlighting that the thought behind their pairing was only algorithmic and never genuine. Sreeleela, then, sleepwalks through the role that asks her to spill out a few lines in a twang, while Ravi Teja (twirling his Vikramarkudu moustache) pulls his usual antics after learning that he won’t even be marginally tested, once again, as an actor.

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Mass Jathara is an interesting film in that it throws a few challenges to its principal characters, albeit largely as placeholders for a goal that doesn’t really surface at any point. It has the routine central conflict of an infallible hero matching up to a merciless villain(s), but with a kind of writing that hasn’t evolved with the times, the payoff is just as routine and dull as one would expect. The very idea of masculinity in today’s Telugu movie is in dire need of an upgrade, and Mass Jathara confirms this further: for instance, the bad guy’s animalistic instincts are made evident in how he holds the woman he loves hostage by literally chaining her to a pillar. In a later scene, when the good guy does the rescue act, he ends it with a proposition that should the bad guy survive the next few days, he could “have” the woman to himself regardless. The heroic intervention is snubbed easily and unknowingly with the age-old bartering of the woman’s autonomy, and Mass Jathara isn’t the only film today guilty of displaying such traits.

At the end of it all, there isn’t much to take home with as far as this film is concerned. The desire to see the Ravi Teja of yonder (with his recent film Eagle showing some traces of it) continues, but the problem doesn’t only lie in his choices as much as in the general quality of mainstream writing, which is defiantly outdated in the name of old-school. Mass Jathara tries to package itself in a blaring soundscape and a kind of primalism that has come to be in vogue in the post-Kantara world. Yet, it is tough to pick this one up from the shelves, even if you can tell it apart from the ones surrounding it.

Mass Jathara movie director: Bhanu Bhogavarapu
Mass Jathara movie cast: Ravi Teja, Sreeleela, Rajendra Prasad, Naveen Chandra, Naresh
Mass Jathara movie rating: 2 stars