20 years of Pokiri: The film that asked a different question about Mahesh Babu

He sat across from Mahesh Babu and walked him through the story: an undercover police officer who embeds himself inside a criminal network, assumes the identity of a contract killer, and has to convince everyone around him, including the woman he falls for, that he is exactly who he says he is. Mahesh liked it but felt the backdrop needed reworking to sit right with Telugu audiences. They reworked the script together, replaced the original title with Pokiri, and set production for 2005. While waiting for the actor to finish his other commitments, Puri directed Nagarjuna in Super. Then he came back.

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What Puri Jagannadh got right

Pandu, played by Mahesh Babu, is a contract killer operating in Hyderabad’s underworld. He takes jobs for money and answers to no one. He falls for Shruti, an aerobics teacher who wants nothing to do with the life he leads. What the audience does not know until the film chooses to reveal it is that Pandu is actually an undercover police officer named Krishna Manohar, assigned to bring down two rival mafia factions from the inside.

The undercover premise is one of the more fragile things in commercial cinema. It works only as long as the hero reads as genuinely dangerous. The moment the audience senses a hero playing a criminal, rather than a criminal who might eventually emerge as a hero, the entire construct collapses. Puri Jagannadh understood this and built the first half entirely on Pandu’s credibility as a threat. Mahesh Babu held it up by doing something he had not been asked to do before: stripping away the charm and warmth that had made him popular, leaving only stillness and controlled menace.

Around him, Puri assembled a cast that gave every character its own logic. Prakash Raj’s Ali Bhai is the don operating from Dubai. Ashish Vidyarthi, playing a corrupt inspector, gave the film a second source of danger from a different direction entirely. The world Pandu moved through felt genuinely hostile in a way that mattered.

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The full scale of what Puri Jagannadh had built only became clear as Pokiri began moving across industries. The Tamil remake, Pokkiri, arrived in 2007. Prabhu Deva directed, marking his debut behind the camera in Tamil cinema, with Vijay in the lead and Asin opposite him. The film ran for over 200 days at the Tamil Nadu box office. Two years later, Prabhu Deva took the same material to Bollywood and directed Wanted with Salman Khan, which became one of the biggest commercial successes of 2009 in Hindi cinema, gave Salman a career resurgence after a difficult run, produced one of his most repeated dialogues, and began his now-established tradition of Eid releases. The Kannada remake, Porki, followed in 2010 with Darshan in the lead.

Through all three remakes, Prakash Raj played the villain. The same character, written by the same man, anchored films in three different languages for three very different leading men, and all three worked.

What Pokiri left behind

Pokiri changed several things simultaneously and made each change look permanent. For Ileana D’Cruz, in only her second Telugu film, it turned her into one of the most sought-after actresses in the industry. For Mahesh Babu, it answered the mass hero question definitively and opened a new and more expansive chapter in his career. For Puri Jagannadh, it delivered the blockbuster he had promised himself and established a filmmaking identity that would define his work for years: sharp dialogues, morally complex heroes, villains who felt genuinely dangerous, and a pace that trusts the audience to keep up without being guided.

The template of Pokiri left a long mark on Telugu commercial cinema. The street-level hero operating in morally ambiguous territory, the villain managing events from a distance, the love interest caught between attraction and disapproval: all of it got absorbed into the industry’s playbook and played back across a decade of films that followed. Some of them worked, however, most did not.

But beyond what it did for careers and for the genre, Pokiri moved something larger. A Telugu film, built entirely on Telugu ground, had become the source material for major productions in Tamil and Hindi. That had not been ordinary. It pointed toward something the industry was beginning to understand about its own reach, its own value as a storytelling engine for the rest of the country. Twenty years later, Pokiri still holds.