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Filmmaker Gopichand Malineni is a lazy filmmaker and case in point is his latest directorial Veera Simha Reddy. Starring Nandamuri Balakrishna in the lead role, the film demands from the audience absolute, unconditional and unquestioning loyalty. If you can’t agree to these terms, then this movie has almost nothing to offer, except the hyper-stylized violent sequences.
The opening moments of a film are very important as it enjoys the audience’s absolute attention. And a competent filmmaker would put his best effort to make the opening of the movie memorable. But, not Gopichand. The film’s opening scene is so generic that it fades away from our memory minutes after we watch it. The story opens in Istanbul, where Meenakshi (Honey Rose) is running a restaurant, serving ragi mudde and country chicken curry. For some reason, a hotel mogul wants to buy her small business. She says no and he slaps her. It gives her son and our hero Jai Simha Reddy (Balakrishna) to beat the hotel mogul and his men to a pulp. And then there is a flow of utterly unrealistic sequences that numb our brains.
It suffices to say that Jai meets Eesha (Shruti Haasan) and takes it upon himself to tame her arrogance and turn her into an ideal woman. If you have watched this trope once, you have watched it a million times. And as expected, it works. Now Eesha’s father wants to meet Jai’s parents to fix their marriage. And finally, Meenakshi decides to tell Jai the truth about his father, Veera Simha Reddy (Balakrishna, again).
Veera is the defender of helpless people in the Rayalaseema district. Here the film expects us to take a gigantic cognitive leap that in Rayalaseema there is no rule of law. Like in ancient times, the villages in that place are being ruled by uncrowned kings. Some kings are good and some are bad. No prizes for guessing to which category Veera belongs. But, there is a bad ruler named Gangi Reddy, who’s terrorising his people. Gangi is a textbook psychopath who has no value for life. Veera prevails over Gangi and rescues the people in the village. Now, Gangi’s son Pratap Reddy (Duniya Vijay) vows to avenge his father. This is just part of the flashback. In another part, we see Veera repeatedly sparing the life of Pratap. Why is Veera not killing Pratap?
Everything that happens in this film is something we have seen Balakrishna do 100 times before. Didn’t he do the same things in his last film? Yes, he did. And he will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. For Balakrishna, creating material for self-serving purposes takes precedence over creating an honest work of entertainment for people’s enjoyment. In that process, Balakrishna invented a new genre for himself. It’s called the Jai Balayya genre. The film made in this genre with this star is all about adulation and blind loyalty. People with even the slightest inclination to think independently, can’t help but feel repulsed by what’s unspooling on the screen.
The troubling part of Veera Simha Reddy, by that token most of Balakrishna’s movies, is that it argues it’s okay to kill to solve a problem. And the act of killing someone is directly connected to one’s manliness. If you are man enough, you will kill. If not, you will get killed. There’s nothing more at stake here except for a few inflated egos of men who have toxic relationships with their manliness. This film has no soul or clarity. It’s just a series of senseless, make-believe violence strung together to propagate a false message that violence could fix all problems.
Even an AI tool can come up with a better plot than Gopichand.
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