Alludu Seenu Review

When the writers Gopi Mohan and Kona Venkat are around, even trigger-happy bhais can be extremely bakwaas.  They can be funny and even subtly benign.  They easily fall prey to the hero's mind games, entertain the henchmen around them with gay abandon, have less than normal number of goondas to execute even the most important murder of their lives..

'Alludu Seenu' is Gopi Mohan-meets-VV Vinayak in a blistering way.  There is the lavishness and the unrealistic milieu that Vinayak is reputed for.  Then, as if to remind us of the aforementioned writers' earlier works, there is the unusually cunning hero and ridiculously foolish baddies, who both look confident but only one of them knows what is happening.

Seenu (Bellamkonda Srinivas) is a fun-loving orphan, who lives with Narasimha (Prakash Raj), whom he calls 'mavayya', for a change.  He is full of guts but his weakness is his 'mavayya'.  Situations land them in a peculiar situation when Seenu comes to know of a dreaded, cash-rich bhai in Hyderabad.  The bhai looks exactly like his 'mavayya' and this triggers a plan in his mind.  What begins as a fun trip brings Seenu and Narasimha face-to-face with bhai.  Seenu comes to know that there is more than meets the eye when he learns that his 'mavayya' had known the bhai since long.  He now hatches a mind game to befool bhai with the aim of redeeming his 'mavayya' and winning his girl, Anjali (played by Samantha).

Although the script seems to have for the hero as big a role as what Mahesh got in Dookudu, the second half hardly registers Srinivas' presence in our minds.  Vinayak's conscious effort, it seems, was to prop up the redoubtable Brahmanandam, who is victimised the way he was in Dookudu.  The heroism is underplayed even in the first half, with the director consciously choosing an item song within the first 10 minutes; so, instead of an I-will-rule-the-world kinda song that debut heroes boringly sing with utmost difficulty, Tamannah chips in with an item song, with the hero content with worshipping the item girl.  As the film progresses, a host of characters, namely Dimple (Brahmanandam), Lungi Baba (Raghu Babu), Panda (Ravi Babu) and so on take care of the entertainment quotient.

Even Prakash Raj and Pradeep Rawat (as the superstitious, astrology-obsessed Bhanu Bhai from Sharjah) are used to evoke laughter. The bigger the bhai, the funnier he is.  You would expect scores of henchmen and loads of bloodshed but no, one fight is mercifully cut short thanks to the interval bang and another high-budget fight in Dubai is sagaciously averted by having the bhai go all alone in a car.  That's a huge relief, isn't it?

To the extent that this one is designed to fit into a template, the film works.  But a good part of the film looks quite perfunctory because the comic timing looks rather contrived.  Vinayak used JP and others as much as Ram Charan to make his last film look reasonably good, but here he seems to have consciously relegated the hero to a less than important position.  The songs, otherwise well-shot, look too much to take as all of them are alike and have the hero displaying his dancing skills.  Samanta makes a difficult attempt at crying in a scene or two and at entertaining us in those songs.

The hero very sharply looks in to the camera and we are not sure that is indicative of his confidence levels!  For a debutante, he comes across as good enough.  In the presence of actors like Brahmi and Prakash Raj, he looks a bit overshadowed.

Technically, the film has good music from DSP.  The camera work as well as editing are fine.

Verdict: A full-on commercial film where comedy scenes, songs, fights and sentimental scenes come in the expected measure.

Rating: 3.25/5

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