Vasool Raja

Story: Raja (Navdeep) is small time conman with tricks aplenty. He joins hands with a bunch of baddies scheming to acquire a huge weapons consignment from an overseas gangster. But Raja seems to have an agenda of his own – to pull off the biggest heist of his life.

Movie Review: Few actors just seem to have a happy knack of picking all the right movies. Navdeep isn’t one of them. He just seems to be going from one bad movie – we are talking about his solo starrers – to another. More often than not you come out of a Navdeep movie (excluding the multi-starrers ie) thinking this guy can act but why does he do so many B-Grade films like this one. Either he’s inundated with mediocre scripts all the time or he just doesn’t chose wisely, or probably doesn’t care. Whatever the reason, we’ll limit our scrutiny to this particular movie, although there isn’t much to scrutinize per se.

We have a smooth talking fraudster who’s had enough of stealing cars and pulling off small time con jobs. Because he’s fallen in love with Janaki (Ritu) – masquerading as a well to do businessman – and wants to do one final scam to live happily ever after with the love of his life, or so we are told. He gets hired by a gang of villains – a drug dealer, an illegal arms dealer and a mafia don – plotting to procure illegal weapons costing Rs 100 crore. However, the deal goes bust and each of the baddies starts getting murdered one after another. Is Raja behind all this? That’s pretty obvious, but why is he doing it? By then you are really beyond the point of caring.

Srihari plays ACP Yadav, a hot headed police officer who’s assigned with the task of tracking the weapon’s consignment. He carries of the role in his typical overstated style, only it just doesn’t fly this time around. There are a couple of forced comic tracks involving Sathyam Rajesh, Thagubothu Ramesh and Brahmandam but they offer little respite.

Let’s just say the quality of acting is in sync with the utter mediocre the production values of the movie and leave it at that. Hold there’s a rather glossy beach song that’s the only bright spot in the movie, but it only lasts 5 minutes.

Note: Make sure you eat your stomach’s fill so you can sleep through a muggy summer afternoon in the comfort of air conditioning.