Rating: 2/5
Banner: Yellow Flowers
Cast: Nandamuri Balakrishna, Parvathi Melton, Esha Chawla, Kota, Jayaprakash Reddy and others
Music: Chakri
Editing: Gowtham Raju
Cinematographer: Surendar Reddy
Story, screenplay, direction: Ravi Kumar Chavali
Producer: Puppala Ramesh
Release date: 30/08/2012
Nandamuri Balakrishna who could not score with his last release ‘Adhinayakudu’ has now arrived with another entertainer and this time he has a different theme. Let us see how this is..
Story
Srimannarayana (Balakrishna) is a journalist with a TV channel and he believes in fighting against injustice. He inherits these ideals from his father (Vijay Kumar) who believes in serving the farmers to his best. As part of that, he starts an initiative named Jai Kisan and collects funds of nearly 5000 crores. Meanwhile, Srimannarayana becomes a pain for the local minister (Jayaprakash Reddy) and his brother (Supreeth) along with a Hawala guy Harshad (Suresh). The story takes a turn when Srimannarayana’s father dies and the funds vanish from the account. The blame falls on Srimannarayana. How all that happens and what Srimannarayana does forms the rest of the story.
Performances
Nandamuri Balakrishna is committed actor. He doesn’t compromise on his dance, dialogue delivery, body language and despite his age he gives his 100% to fill the youth character. He did justice to the role.
Parvathi Melton is perhaps seen in a proper masala role for the first time. She has oozed her glamour wherever required and has that natural beauty with sex appeal. But it is better she piles few pounds. If she does that she is sure to rock.
Esha Chawla has wild sex appeal written all over her. She has that nativity oomph factor and with an innocently sexy smile she provides the much needed turn-on factor. If she can choose her roles rightly, she will have a good future as glamour heroine.
Jayaprakash Reddy was comical as usual, Supreeth was not used to his potential, same with Ravu Ramesh, Nagineedu was brief, Kota was regular, Suresh came as a surprise. Vijay Kumar was standard. Krishna Bhagawan and M S Narayana were weak. Duvvasi Mohan had few funny dialogues. Vinod Kumar could have done it better. The others didn’t have much to offer.
Highlights
- Balayya’s presence
Drawbacks
- Weak storyline
- Powerless scenes
- Abrupt editing
- No punch dialogues
Analysis
Ravi Kumar Chavali is known to be a message oriented director given his past movies so this was actually a good opportunity for him to showcase his thoughts because he had a powerful actor like Balakrishna. But then, in the process of coming up with a message oriented theme and mixing it up with commercial elements, the whole thing got botched up.
Time and again, many directors dealing with Balayya are doing the same mistake. They are unable to gauge his screen power, his range of dialogues and try to treat him with common man roles like journalist, lecturer etc. Unfortunately such roles don’t work for this star. There has to be high ammunition in Balayya’s dialogues and heavy artillery in his characterization. That is the minimum standard. If that is not met then the film tends to flunk.
The other thing Ravi should note is giving strength to the villain. Despite the presence of six bad boys, none of them had the power or the stamina to stand opposite Balayya properly. If the villain is not strong, then the hero’s positioning goes weak. Bringing peaks, adding some entertainment quotient are some basic fundamentals which were not applied.
The film takes off with a little promise but after fifteen minutes the energy comes down. The interval bang was met with mixed reactions and second half had a little tempo. But again, the whole thing got predictable and due to the lack of a strong plot, everything looked flimsy.
Overall, this is a film which doesn’t have much for Nandamuri fans or the regular audience. The rating is purely out of respect for Balayya’s image and his sincerity in his performances.
Bottomline: You can chant the name of ‘Narayana’ than watching this one
(Venkat can be reached at [email protected] or https://twitter.com/varikatla)
