Yevadu

Story: Sathya (Allu Arjun) is left fighting for his life after Dheeru Bhai (Rahul Dev) and gang kill his girlfriend Deepth (Kajal). Sathya is saved by a miraculous face transplant surgery and he returns to take his revenge. The face belongs to a guy called Charan (Ram Charan) and his past catches up with Sathya.

Movie Review: What made John Woo’s Face Off a great film wasn’t just the premise of a face/identity swap. The attention to detail is what made it believable. Sean Archer (John Travolta) has a micro chip implanted in his larynx to make him sound like Castor Troy (Nicolas Cage), and is shown undergoing a slew of corrective plastic surgeries on the rest of his body as well as plot device to get the audience in on it.

The movie is laced with plenty of brilliantly conceived episodes that establish that it’s just the bodies that are exchanged and not the personalities. While the biological merit of those purported surgeries could be contested, it reflects the filmmaker’s respect for the viewers’ intelligence. It’s something mana Tollywood filmmakers lack completely.

So when Allu Arjun comes out sounding and behaving like Ram Charan after the ‘face transplant’ we are supposed to cheer for the star rather than the character he’s supposed to be playing. Guess the audience (the reviewers included) have little option other than suffering the intelligence (the lack of it rather) of the filmmakers. The sad part is this kind of stuff is actually not bad by our general standards.

Why else would we keep producing cheap imitations (and that’s putting it kindly) of Hollywood blockbusters week after week. Many celebrated filmmakers have made careers out of making sufficiently dumbed down adaptation of cult Hollywood films. We haven’t got to world cinema yet.

This movie this isn’t a rip off of Face Off. We don’t have filmmakers who have the required creativity and technical know how to make half decent adaptation of that 1997 action thriller. The director just borrows the central idea to dish out another silly revenge drama. No. It offers two revenge dramas rolled into one. After finishing off everyone responsible for his girlfriend’s murder, he goes about killing all those responsible for the murder of Charan. Well, Charan’s story is revealed in the post interval flashback episode.

For all the hype surrounding Ram Charan and Allu Arjun acting together in the movie there isn’t a single episode in which the two share the screen together. Neither does it offer the spectacle of the duo dancing together in a dream sequence. What we get is the statutory truckloads of action and high decibel background score.

When not beating up people to pulp or dancing like a dream, Ram Charan waltzes through the entire film with one and a half expressions. Sai Kumar indulges his vocal chords in what must be one of the most over the top villain characters ever. A few more of such roles and he will certainly break the outer limit of human hearing threshold of 20000 HZ. Kota Srinivasa Rao and Jayasudha carry off their roles with characteristic aplomb. Shruti looks pretty, but has little else to do.

Devi Sri Prasad’s compositions though formulaic are perhaps the most enjoyable part of the movie besides Charan’s dancing i.e. Allu Arjun is convincing in his cameo as well. Well the action choreography is just undecipherable. There are so many stunts that you can’t tell one from another. And yes there is Brahmanandam as well, but his comedy track seems to have disappeared in the edit suite.

Note: It’s loaded with high decibel screaming and sounds of human bodies being bashed to pulp, so those with sensitive eardrums might want to carry protection.