Sunday, August 16, 2015

Srimanthudu

Just back from Srimanthudu. It got good reviews and P decided this was the last chance she was going to give Mahesh Babu. As it turned out, ‘Prince’ redeems himself with an earnest, genuinely heroic role after that string of hero-valiant, seeti-maar, misogynist rubbish.



A nice story with a conscience, I was happy with most things about Srimanthudu, including the time they took to establish the hero’s dissatisfaction with the wealth his family urges him to enjoy. Like Siddhartha Gautama, a whiff of the outside world is enough to lure Harsha into trying to ease other people’s troubles. They’re family, he tells his father repeatedly, and he means it. A man with a capacity to adopt – truly adopt – an entire village. I found him inspirational.

I was less than enthralled with the numerous fight sequences and thoroughly disgruntled with the last one, a final confrontation with a barrage of menacing villains which should exhibited more brains than it did. Also a bit shocked that the resolution to the problem involved murder and arson!

Also, I wish I could have brought myself to like Shruti Hassan, because for once, here was a female lead with a story, a purpose and a mission. However, I found the actor’s puckered-lips reactions to every situation extremely distracting. (Why, why do they mess with the faces creation gave them?) Plus, I’m not a big fan of Tollywood’s female dubbing artistes, who can manage to ruin any talking part at all.

The Telugu industry is having a good run, isn’t it! 

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