Rex, a Florida party girl, turns out to be the only hope for the NASA space program after a fluke puts her in training with other candidates who may have better resumés, but don't have her smarts, heart, and moxie.
There’s a well-tested, and mostly well-liked, formula being recycled in Amazon’s lightweight Fourth of July comedy Space Cadet. It’s the mildly rousing story of an underestimated blonde excelling in a more serious field, something Goldie Hawn aced in Private Benjamin and Protocol before Melanie Griffith took over with Working Girl and Born Yesterday, followed by Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde (the less said about Jessica Simpson’s two under-the-radar attempts, the better). It’s an easy, against-all-odds rise for us to get behind and a career-defining every-scene showcase for an actor who may have also found herself unfairly undervalued by the industry.
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There’s something for both actor and character to prove, and when it’s done right, we should be able to taste the same hunger, cheering for an inevitable victory. But in the writer-director Liz W Garcia’s blandly cobbled together attempt, one will have trouble tasting much of anything. It’s another cheap and poorly made category-filler, the kind that makes you want to reconsider how many streaming subscriptions you’re paying for, a grim, plasticky reminder of what so many films look and feel like now.
The Netflix-led rise of romantic and female-led comedies has been a superficial win, given how they’d been largely absent from the big screen in recent years, a large audience barely catered to. But too many of them have been made without much care, lazily thrown together unlike the glossier films that they’re modeled on. Space Cadet is as garishly lit and shoddily green-screened as the worst of them, which is distractingly bad enough in itself but something that could perhaps be tempered by other elements. The current Netflix hit A Family Affair, with Nicole Kidman romancing Zac Efron, looks far uglier than it should, but there’s enough charm from the performers and the script to make it just about work. Here the visuals are as rough as everything else, saving graces nowhere to be found.
The star Emma Roberts has been somewhere similar before, in 2007’s Wild Child, in which an English boarding school tamed her Californian excess. Here the journey to self-discovery takes her, as the improbably nicknamed Rex, from Florida, where she has turned bartending into a lifestyle, drinking and partying hard with her best friend, Nadine (Hacks’ Poppy Liu), to Nasa, where she hopes to live out her dream of going to space. Rex had been accepted to Georgia Tech years ago but dropped out when her mother got sick. After Nadine spruces up her application to become an astronaut with some embellishments, she finds herself in her element but out of her depth.
The film exists in the kind of frothy far-away fantasy land where audience questions are not only discouraged but ridiculed. It’s not supposed to be taken seriously, defenders would say – fine – but even in such heightened territory, there has to be some sense of structure and Garcia’s script just isn’t smart or slick enough to have us suspend disbelief entirely. No one would check to see if she had really won a Pulitzer? References would be obtained long after she was hired? A one-time Georgia Tech applicant would attend her first day in skimpy party gear? The problem is that Rex’s ascent is not only absurd but crucially uninvolving - we simply don’t care if she makes it to space or not – and Roberts, comfortable and competent in this territory if not entirely convincing, is unable to lift her character out of network sitcom cliche.
The uplift of a woman triumphing in a male-dominated Stem world isn’t enough to get us through a mess of grindingly unfunny dialogue, too-broad performances and an utter, movie-killing lack of charm. Films like Space Cadet should feel graceful and light, going down easy like the many sweet cocktails we see Rex prepare, but this one is hopelessly muddled, a bitter first sip that proceeds to curdle.
In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a woman rebels against a tyrannical ruler in search for her homeland with the aid of a group of female prisoners, a psychotic worshipper and a drifter named Max.
Director: George Miller
Writers: George MillerBrendan McCarthyNick Lathouris
If you’ve relished the Mad Max series, your heart will leap in Mad Max: Fury Road the first time a “War Rig” made of leftover car and truck frames (human skulls affixed to the grille) or a turbo-charged, weaponized jeep swerves into the foreground and then suddenly roars off into the distance at a 45-degree angle while the camera continues on its scorching horizontal track. It’s a signature move by director George Miller, who gets scary-close (he’s fucking with us) and then says, “Eat my dust.”
That dust tastes damn good. The majority of sequels have no reason for being apart from sequel money, but watching this fourth Mad Max, I could sense after roughly .0001 seconds that the 70-year-old Aussie director has been revving his engines for a long, long time, itching to get back to the blacktop and deliver even wilder automotive mayhem. After all, his last two films, Happy Feet and Happy Feet 2, centered on animated dancing penguins. He has some serious punk cred to restore.
As you no doubt know from all the buzz, most critics think Miller has his cred back and then some, and they’ve given him a hero’s welcome. That gives me happy feet. The man made Max Max, The Road Warrior, Lorenzo’s Oil, and especially Babe: Pig in the City, which is like Charlotte’s Web retold by Dickens. (As a sequel, a box-office megabomb, and a film starring a pig, it has never gotten its due.) And Mad Max: Fury Road is certainly a blast and a half: You don’t just watch it, you rock out to it. How satisfied you’ll be after all the “wow!”s and “whew!”s will depend on how fine you are with a film that starts in the middle of the story and is basically a long chase. I saw it twice and liked it vastly more the second time around, when I’d adjusted my expectations and had my bearings from the get-go. Then it became about digging the spectacle — not to mention the hilarious sexual politics.
This is not, it should be said, a “reboot.” It’s the same Mad Max, post-Thunderdome, though now played by Tom Hardy, Mel Gibson having been judged too old and, more important, too genuinely mad to continue in the series that launched him to stardom 36 years ago. “My world is fire and blood,” says Max in voice-over, standing on a cliff, at one with the poisoned, postapocalyptic wasteland, his face hidden by a swarm of filthy hair. He stomps a big boot down on a scurrying lizard, snatches it up, and shoves it in his mouth: crunch.
A blizzard of images evokes his inner life: bombs, bodies, the killing of his wife and child. The little girl calls to him in visions, which is strange because I remember his child being (a) a toddler and (b) a boy — but it was a long time and many bodies ago, and I might be wrong. Or maybe she’s not his child but a sort of emissary from the world of child spirits. Miller does a cool, stroboscopic fun-house effect with the little girl’s face — now flesh, now bone, now flesh again. Max wants like mad to be emotionally dead, numb to the carnage, but this moppet keeps jolting him back to life.
The prologue in which Max is chased, captured, tattooed, branded, and put in a cage by raiders from a towering citadel is stunningly well done — particularly if you see the film in 3-D, which Miller uses like a macabre ringmaster, chucking arrows, bones, and parts of cars and bodies at you. This citadel — known far and wide as “the Citadel” — is presided over by Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), a sickeningly disfigured tyrant who stands high above his sheeple, promising them immortal life in the corridors of Valhalla while taunting them for their dependence. (He makes them beg for water.) Actually, everyone in the Citadel is sickeningly disfigured, emaciated, or studded with tumors from living in a radioactive landscape. But Immortan Joe takes the uranium cake. His flesh is mottled and covered with … yecchy stuff. In a steel mask notable for its Neanderthal set of choppers, he looks like a walking shrunken head topped with a white fright wig.
This is all awesome, but I actually had a hard time getting past my awe and into the movie. Max isn’t just emotionally remote. He’s matted with dirt and kept in shadow. He’s chained to the front of a truck, everything below his eyes concealed by a steel face-cage. It’s mighty peculiar that here, as in The Dark Knight Rises, an actor with maybe the most fascinating visage in movies spends so much time behind a mask. You do get a lot from those eyes, which signal sadness and desperation. But the lips are where it’s at. They’re not just fashionably pillowy. They’re neo-Brando blubbery. They signal a swelling, an excess of emotion. They make you understand why the sounds that come out of his mouth are not always recognizable as English: What words could do justice to that much feeling? Casting Hardy as a man who shrouds his emotions and then covering his face is just … mad. Half an hour into Mad Max: Fury Road, I felt as if the nominal hero and I hadn’t been properly introduced.
There is, of course, another hero. Heroine. The story proper kicks off when Immortan Joe’s top raider — Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron with a shaved head and one steel arm — sets off on a mission in a ramshackle War Rig before suddenly changing course. Joe checks on his breeders, but they’re gone. He screams to Heaven and orders up his army. The chase is on!
Wait. Who is Furiosa? (She has barely said a word.) Who — or what — are the breeders? Who is the old woman shrieking at Immortan Joe? By now it’s clear that Miller’s strategy is to throw you into the tumultuous action and only later show you what’s at stake and why you should care. He thinks he’s cunningly withholding major details to keep you guessing, but there isn’t enough information to guess from before he, well, cuts to the chase. It’s backwards storytelling.
Call me bourgeois, but I like a little more context for my mayhem, which is why I was more involved the second time, when I knew Furiosa, knew the breeders, and knew a bit more about why Max was on the front of a truck connected by an IV line to a skinny, bald guy with a white face and blackened eye sockets — who looks on first (and second) glance exactly like the hundred other skinny bald guys with white faces and blackened eye sockets but turns out to be a major character called Nux (Nicholas Hoult).
Mad Max: Fury Road wakes up, dramatically speaking, when Max and Furiosa meet, with (rousingly staged) fisticuffs at first but soon with more affection. Slightly more, anyway. Both their hearts having been tanned into leather by tragedy, they’re wary of connection, and Furiosa isn’t too trusting of men to begin with. It’s an extraordinary performance by Theron, who barely emotes but whose hardness is broken by glints of guilt and grief. It’s a mighty moment when, given terrible news, she staggers towards a titanic sand dune — it rises from nowhere, but nothing less would be worthy of her — and sinks to her knees in despair. At time like that, you might wish the film had been called Mad Maxine and had followed her from the start.
It’s a woman-centric movie. Furiosa is fleeing across the vast wasteland in search of a matriarchal oasis she calls the “green place of many mothers.” And those breeders turn out to be a pampered harem of willowy model types (one brown-haired, one white-blonde, one redhead, one tall and black-haired, one smaller and more racially exotic) tasked with bearing Immortan Joe healthy children. Why a group of women so skinny they look as if they’d pitch off the side of a runway from lack of food should be so evolutionarily desirable in a time of sickness and starvation is a mystery — but not really much of one given the high level of wowza on display. Maybe the best visual joke in the movie is when Max staggers out of the desert and beholds them for the first time, shimmering in the heat, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Zoe Kravitz, Abbey Lee, Courtney Eaton, and Riley Keough in skimpy, shorty, filmy dresses, hosing one another off in lyrical semi-slow motion.
Mad Max: Fury Road is actually full of brilliant visual jokes, its desert a mythic stage for a punk-rococo circus of freaks. Behold the great pile of steering wheels on which the bald warriors descend, each man bearing his own away with reverence, as if it’s Excalibur. There’s a little tree in the middle of the desert that looks like it’s waiting for Vladimir and Estragon. The sight of a half dozen or so bongo drummers on the back of a War Rig is a marvelous setup for the revelation of the masked, heavy-metal rocker guitarist tied to the front, his instrument belching flames at moments of peak bloodlust. (The authors of Dogme 95 would be pleased: Miller has incorporated his musicians into the action.) In the climactic, high-speed road battle, warriors on long poles bend in and out of the frame throwing bombs and snatching up women: It’s as if you’d smoked weed and started watching an old Western and suddenly the stagecoach turned into a truck full of supermodels and the charging Injuns vampire acrobats. The knowledge that the vampire acrobats are mostly real stuntmen moving really, really fast instead of 1s and 0s in a computer adds exponentially to the WTF quotient.
Miller clearly felt he needed to raise the stakes — to top himself — in Mad Max: Fury Road, and the road fury is, indeed, packed with multiple, crazy-funny variables. But at the end of the road I have to admit that I prefer the cleaner, sharper climax of The Road Warrior, which has no CGI whatsoever. You lose things in the clutter.
That said, Miller has a trick up his sleeve that he didn’t three decades ago: grannies on motorcycles. It turns out that what compelled him to make this fourth Mad Max was the notion of a nurturing, matriarchal society far removed from the grotesque sadism of male-warrior culture. The gorgeously weatherbeaten old women who roar out of the wasteland to greet Furiosa and Company tolerate Max and show some affection for Nux — the bald, mortally ill, white-painted War Boy who longed to die in battle but was so lovably clumsy that he wound up on the side of the girls. But these tough old birds don’t want or need men, those disease-carrying homicidal brats who turned a world that was once a garden into a nuclear wasteland. Also, the old ladies gaze on those cute little models as if it would be really nice to curl up with them under the stars.
It’s a wonderful joke that so-called men’s-rights groups have expressed outrage over Mad Max: Fury Road — so wonderful that I’d suspect the studio of cooking up the controversy by itself if I didn’t know that such morons actually exist. In their eyes, Miller has committed an unforgivable sin by appropriating their cultural space to promote femi-Nazism. He has made a movie with more amazing motorcycles than a biker’s rally and more high-decibel mash-ups than a monster truck event: FUCKIN’ A, AWWRIGHT! He has stuffed it with every shape and size of gun imaginable: BOO-YAH! Then he made a bald chick and a bunch of grannies more potent than an armada of male giants with mighty pecs — who turn out under all the war paint to be squalling babies with disease-ridden pencil dicks. The final battle takes place in a narrow passage through a canyon that looks suspiciously like a stand-in for the gates of Thermopylae. That’s when it really hits you: The Lesbos have taken Sparta!
A shy student trying to reach his family in Ohio, a gun-toting bruiser in search of the last Twinkie and a pair of sisters striving to get to an amusement park join forces in a trek across a zombie-filled America.
Twelve years after its release, Zombieland (2009) remains one of the most enjoyable films in the flesh-eating genre. Its secret sauce? Brilliant casting – five Academy Award nominees – fast pacing, and the fact it just doesn’t take itself too seriously.
The premise of Zombieland is pretty simple: four jaded individuals reluctantly join forces and carpool across the country during a zombie apocalypse. The narrator, Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) is a social recluse who has survived by following a list of conservative rules, including staying fit enough to outrun the zombies (Rule #1: Cardio) and shooting them twice to make sure they’re actually dead (Rule #2: Double Tap).
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Director Ruben Fleischer made his directorial debut with this film, and takes great delight in covering each of these rules in gory detail: a homemaker escapes the neighbourhood zombie kids, only to go flying through her windscreen because she’s not buckled up (Rule #4: Seatbelts).
Columbus, with his irritable bowel syndrome and rolling suitcase (Rule #7: Travel Light), is the perfect foil for snakeskin jacket and cowboy hat wearing Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson). Tallahassee is in the butt-kicking business (and “business is GOOD”, Harrelson declares, two chainsaws in hand). After a tense standoff, Columbus hitches a ride.
The film looks set to fade into odd-couple mode, until the pair are outwitted by jaded 20-something Wichita (Emma Stone), and her pre-teen sister, Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). The women quickly hustle the unsuspecting men, taking their guns and their truck (not once, but twice), on a quest to reach Pacific Playland, their childhood happy place.
Part of what makes this film work is the chemistry between the cast. There’s a sense of ease and camaraderie, which is greatly helped by the film’s zippy editing, well-paced flashbacks, clever use of graphics and snappy dialogue (Little Rock’s explanation of Hannah Montana to an engrossed Tallahassee stands out).
Above all, they seem to be having fun, something missing from most of the exhaustingly gritty string of zombie productions that have emerged over the last two decades, from the 11 angst-riddled seasons of The Walking Dead to Hollywood hit World War Z and umpteenth Resident Evil film. When the cast trash and smash an Arizona gift store, their delight is so genuine, you kinda wish you could be in there with them. A standout moment is the appearance of actor Bill Murray, who shows up in a brilliantly executed cameo.
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While Murray almost steals the show, it’s Harrelson as Tallahassee who ends up carrying the film. His character offers a handy roadmap in how to deal with the apocalypse: indulge in blind rage to vent your frustration, develop a dark sense of humour, and pursue your comfort food of choice (Twinkies) at all costs. He even inspires Columbus to add another rule to his list (#Rule 32: Enjoy the Little Things).
It doesn’t set out to be, but by the end this zombie movie is quite sweet. Sure, there’s blood, guts and gore, but the virtues of loyalty, trust and family are established without feeling cheesy or insincere. Almost as much of a triumph as surviving the apocalypse.
After a family tragedy, three generations of the Deetz family return home to Winter River. Still haunted by Beetlejuice, Lydia's life is turned upside down when her teenage daughter, Astrid, accidentally opens the portal to the Afterlife.
Director: Tim Burton
Writers: Alfred GoughMiles MillarSeth Grahame-Smith
Beetlejuice” gets off to a start that’s so charming it never lives it down. The movie is all anticlimax once we realize it’s going to be about gimmicks, not characters.During the enchanted opening minutes of the film, we meet a young married couple who have just moved into a strange new house, and we’re introduced to some of the local townspeople. All of these characters have an offhand, unforced innocence, and no wonder: The movie was directed by Tim Burton, who created a similar feeling in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.” It’s hard to describe what makes the opening scenes so special. Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, as the young couple, seem so giddy, so heedlessly in love, that they project an infectious good cheer. The local folks are so gosh-darn down-home they must have been sired by L. L. Bean out of the “Prairie Home Companion.” The movie is bathed in a foolish charm. And, fool that I am, I expected that note to be carried all the way through the film. But it was not to be.
The young couple die in a silly accident. But they still live in the same house. The only problem is, there’s nothing outside the door except for a strange science-fiction landscape that looks borrowed from Paul Schrader’s “Cat People.” It takes them awhile to figure out they’re dead, and even longer to realize what has happened: Their fate is to remain in their former home as ghosts, while it is sold to a New York family (Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara, with Winona Ryder as their daughter). The New Yorkers have big plans for remodeling the haunted house.
This is all, I guess, a fairly clever idea. And the movie is well-played, especially by Davis (the girlfriend in “The Fly”) and Jones (the emperor in “Amadeus” and the obnoxious principal in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”). But the story, which seemed so original, turns into a sitcom fueled by lots of special effects and weird sets and props, and the inspiration is gone.
To be sure, there has never before been a movie afterworld quite like this. Heaven, or whatever it is, seems a lot like a cruise ship with a cranky crew. The newly-deads find a manual, which instructs them on how to live as ghosts, and they also find an advertisement from a character named Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton), who specializes in “exorcisms of the living.” They enlist him to try to scare the New Yorkers out of the house, but he turns out to be a cantankerous demon – more trouble than he’s worth.
The best thing about “Beetlejuice,” apart from its opening, is the set design by Bo Welch. Both Welch and Burton seem inspired by the spirit of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” and “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” in which objects can have lives of their own and architectural details have an unsettling way of rearranging themselves. The look of the film might be described as cartoon surrealistic. But the film’s dramatic method isn’t nearly as original.
One of the problems is Keaton, as the exorcist. Nearly unrecognizable behind pounds of makeup, he prances around playing Betelgeuse as a mischievous and vindictive prankster. But his scenes don’t seem to fit with the other action, and his appearances are mostly a nuisance. It’s also a shame that Baldwin and Davis, as the ghosts, have to spend most of their time playing tricks on Jones and O’Hara and winning the sympathy of their daughter; I would have been more interested if the screenplay had preserved their sweet romanticism and cut back on the slapstick.
Soulmates Eric and Shelly are brutally murdered. Given a chance to save the love of his life, Eric must sacrifice himself and traverse the worlds of the living and the dead, seeking revenge.
Director: Rupert Sanders
Writers: James O'BarrZach BaylinWilliam Josef Schneider
Few box-office sensations are as intrinsically of their own moment as The Crow, the baroque lullaby of beyond-the-grave retribution that swooped into theaters on a tailwind of tragedy in the summer of 1994. Brandon Lee, the film’s 28-year-old star (and the son of martial-arts legend Bruce Lee), was killed on set in a freak accident involving a prop gun. The dark truth is that his death lent the whole movie a chill of morbid, art-imitating-life gravitas.
You weren’t just watching an actor play a superhero rising from the dirt to avenge his true love. You were seeing, in a sense, the ghost of that actor, conjured on screen via a posthumous performance that blurred the line between real and fictional loss.
Thankfully for all involved, no grave misfortune hangs over the reboot of The Crow, whose behind-the-scenes troubles were more mundane – a string of exiting stars and creative teams that kept it in development hell for years.
Of course, it was more than just the ghoulish fascination of Lee’s presence that made the original a hit. That film was a junky runway show of a comic-book fantasia that got by on style and attitude and fashion sense, on the way it synthesized its goth influences into a highly marketable brand.
This new Crow never tries to party like it’s 1994, which is both a relief and one reason it's destined to become a footnote. Watching it, you’re more aware than ever of how inextricable The Crow is from his Gen X genesis.
Trained by a high profile cop, an encounter specialist masquerading as a Brahmin priest takes on a real estate crime organization after losing his uncle.
Director: Harish Shankar
Writers: Harish ShankarA,. Deepakraj,Ramesh Reddy
Stars: Allu Arjun,Pooja Hegde,Rao Ramesh,
Duvvada Jagannadham Movie Review:
DJ banks on the age-old concept of dushta sikshana (evil will be punished) and takes vigilante-like efforts for the common good. Reason? People have been left shaken by a scam that was masterminded by Royyala Naidu (Rao Ramesh).On the whole, Duvvada Jagannadham will entertain not just die-hard fans, but also the average moviegoer for serving up a heady mix of comedy, action and drama.
Here Allu Arjun acts as a Brahmin caterer but he is also on the mission to set things right in society and later takes on Agro Diamond scam. The story of “DJ Duvvada Jagannadham” is as simple as that. As cliched as the old mass movies! The characterization of Allu Arjun is similar to NTR Jr’s “Adhurs”. But while “Adhurs” was more comedy driven, this has serious tone with sparse comedy.Harish Shankar has left his stamp as writer than director. He is known for writing clever punch lines and he has many such here. But he has completely disappointed with his shabby direction.
The point is when you try making a new recipe, its not merely enough to have all the right ingredients. Youve to know when to switch off the flame. In the end, when you think about this DJ, it just gets loud, louder, loudest. Thumbs down. But hey, Allu Arjun still dances like a dream!
Good dialogues can only do so much to help a mediocre script with average execution.Duvvada Jagannadham is a one-time watch for masses and Allu Arjun fans. For families, there are occasional fun moments, but thats about it. At the Box-Office, Duvvada Jagannadham opened well, may end up as above average in India and lesser than average in overseas markets.
On the whole, DJ is an out and out Allu Arjun film to the core. The star hero is a major attraction and carries the film with his energetic performance. Pooja Hegdes glamor, good comedy, and some mass elements will go supremely well with the masses. Collections wise, this film will do quite well as there is no big film coming up in the near future. Finally, if you ignore the routine story line, lag in the second half and keep your expectations in check, DJ ends up as a good watch this weekend.
Pooja Hegde has convincingly done the given job that is to look stunning in every frame of the film. Especially, she looks ravishing in all the song sequences. Rao Rameshs character that initially comes across as a clever antagonist, has been compromised just to benefit the DJ character. No other performances stand out in the film except Allu Arjuns. It is a commercial entertainer made by the book and it works to some extent. And yes, composer Devi Sri Prasads music is a big plus and dance choreography is just the icing on the cake. If you can keep your expectations level low and watch the movie, it might just be the thing for a lazy weekend.
Though Allu Arjun is decent in Brahmin role, he couldnt go near NTRs performance in Adurs. Allu Arjun completely changes his style towards pre-climax, wears a funky hair style and dressing. Subbaraju talking to his died mother idea totally derails the film. Seeti Maar song is full of Bunny energy with stylish choreography. Posani does a routine role.
DJ – Duvvada Jagannadham movie is a romantic action entertainer written and directed by Harish Shankar and produced by Dil Raju under Sri Venkateswara Creations banner while Devi Sri Prasad scored music for this movie Stylish star Allu Arjun playing the title role.
The prodigal son of a respected leader takes on two political rivals and forms bonds with their daughters in this Telugu-language action drama.
Director: Boyapati Srinu
Writers: M. RathnamBoyapati Srinu
Stars: Ram PothineniSreeleelaSaiee Manjrekar
Skanda Moview Review:
There’s a lot going on in Boyapati Srinu’s Skanda, probably to keep you distracted from the fact that he’s telling you the same ol’ tale of revenge…again. Filled to the brim with characters, with loud music pulsating in the background, the film hardly leaves you time to think – which is both a good and bad thing.
AP CM Rayudu (Ajay Purkar) and TS CM Ranjith Reddy (Sharath Lohithaswa) are thick and fast friends till their children decide to elope together. With apparently nothing better to do, the duo decides to let their egos dictate what happens next. Rudrakanti Ramakrishna Raju (Srikanth) is a hotshot tycoon who has just admitted to crimes he didn’t commit. It’s in a bid to ensure that his daughter Parineeta (Saiee Manjrekar) is safe. His friend (Daggubati Raja) however has a plan. A student (Ram Pothineni) keeps butting heads with his classmate (Sreeleela), seemingly not knowing who she is. How all these people cross paths forms the story.
Like any other Boyapati Srinivas movie, Skanda is high on testosterone, scenes that wax eloquent on the importance of family and friendship, women who have no agency and exist to be tools of revenge and negotiation, ten slick ways of beating up goons, dialogues that equate the protagonist to god…you know the drill. The first half of the film tries to be funny here and there, taking its own sweet time to get into the thick of things before the interval. But the way the scenes pre-interval and the climax play out, Boyapati seems more interested in setting up for the sequel (yes, there’s a Skanda 2) than concentrating on this story.
Skanda works when it’s seen as a tale of friendship, how decisions taken by two sets of friends set things into motion. And it’s also fun to see Ram pull along a bovine like it’s no big deal or shake a leg with Sreeleela to Nee Chuttu Chuttu or Gandarabai. But it gets too messy too soon with everyone from Babloo Prithveeraj and Prince Cecil to Gauthami and Indraja popping in and out of the frame. In fact, right when things reach a peak, yet another character is brought in to save the day when convenient. Thaman’s score that aids the film well in certain scenes but is loud doesn’t help matters. The dialogues are unintentionally funny.
Ram Pothineni shoulders a film that’s nothing but old wine in a new bottle. He seems at ease in the skin of his character, which makes you wonder why he doesn’t oddly get enough screen time in the film. He looks good on screen and hardly falters. Sreeleela dances like a dream, matching Ram’s energy with ease, but she falters in some emotional scenes, so does Saiee Manjrekar. The rest of the cast does best with what they’re offered.
Skanda is not a film you expect logic from, but when it has only Ram and a few action sequences going for it, there’s not much left to entertain either.
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