Jai Simha

What will you do for your love? Can you give up your only purpose to live for love? How much can you push yourself to be the good guy and make choices that force others to feel small in front of you? When you sit on an easy chair at your leisure, these kinds of thoughts will cross your mind and you try to give yourself pat on the back for such thoughts and end up being your regular self the very next moment. The change that these ‘thoughts’ promise, is good to watch on screen than follow them in real-life. Maybe that’s the reason we love films more than anything.

Plot : Narasimha (Balakrishna) is a person who has a liking for being good and only doing good. He cannot tolerate any remotely bad thing and reacts to them for others to term him as a rowdy. He doesn’t care if the guy opposite to him is an influential person, but if he is proven to be a bad person, he will attack them like a Lion.

He has a lioness, Gowri (Nayantara) who feels there is a need to tame him but the guy reacts on his instinct and that worries Gowri’s father (Prakash Raj). Hence, Narasimha takes a decision that distances him from Gowri but when he meets her accidentally during one of his fighting sessions, he gets to know that he saved her son thinking it is his son. How is that possible? What happened between them? Watch the movie for answers…

Performances : Balakrishna is one actor who puts in heart and soul into any film. He did the same here too. He danced like a young person with passion, delivered lines with energy and fought like a wounded lion. But he did not push himself much and stuck to what he does in every movie, so we can’t really find fault or appreciate much.

Nayantara is there so that she can deliver few punch lines and looks at Balakrishna. It is because of her, those scenes carry some weight but the writing and execution are so poor in them, that we end up wondering, was she really required? Natasha and Hari Priya are there to let story have a song and give the plot a twist here and there. Other than that, they don’t get any good scenes or have much character.

All others like Prakash Raj, Sivaji Raja, Brahmanandam, Ashutosh Rana, Prabhakar are all usual in their performances and we don’t really feel there is anything worthy to mention about them.

Technicalities : C. Ram Prasad worked as per the directions of the notable commercial director, K.S. Ravi Kumar. He gave him the pleasing visuals that make people think it is passable and there is nothing special about his camera work to mention. Heavy usage of Drone needed to be curtailed though.

Editor Praveen Anthony might have enjoyed the heavy melodramatic sequences in the second half as he forgot to shorten them. We wonder if we are watching two films in two halves of this one inconsistent film. The tone changes so much that while first half feels passable second half feels like a huge drag.

Chirantan Bhatt was able to give one good popular song for the movie. In that song, Ammu Kutti, even actors put in their full energies to light up the screen. He doesn’t really come up with something exciting in the background score.

M. Ratnam is not a reputed story writer and we know him mostly for his dialogues. That definitely shows in his writing abilities. He tries to cook up a story by watching ten Telugu movies that became a huge success once upon a time. The attempt is so futile that we end up gasping for air after the continuous assault on our senses with highly senseless situations and dialogues.

K.S. Ravi Kumar is a director of 90’s who survived till mid-2000’s but after that, his formula started to appear too old. Same happened in this film. Bringing a 90’s director to tell your 80’s story in 2018, is a big farce move and the film appears to be one too. There is a clear-cut character arc for any supporting or lead role in the film. It is like I know the strength of my hero, I will toy around with it, rather than trying to come up with something fresh. So, the movie ends up as predictable as the morning sunrise.

Analysis : The film is a colossal disappointment of what it even sets out to accomplish. It promises to be a goofy entertainer of 90’s but misses a point that old Super hit movies will be so popular that if you try to remake or re-remake them as a formula or follow their pattern, the audience will start second guessing you easily. When you can guess it out and if it is stretched out so long that you feel one minute as one hour, then you should realize that you’re watching Jai Simha. It may appear to be a better one than other big film but it is equally pathetic with few well-etched scenes here and there.

Rating : 2.5/5

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