Siddhartha

Story : Surya Pratap (Sagar) is a happy-go-lucky-guy. He meets Sahasra (Ragini Nandwani) on his escape to Kuala Lumpur with the fake name Siddhartha. Then they both fall in love. One day, things turn around then his well wishers clears the clouds on Siddhartha’s original identity. Surya leaves to India to clear the pending issues with Mining king Ankineedu & family. Since then Sahasra tries to avoid him to go away from her life. That’s when Pedhayya (Kota Srinivasa Rao) comes up with a plan to make two families come together by making Surya marry his granddaughter Apsara (Sakshi Chowdary). Will Surya marry Apsara or go back to marry Sahasra forms rest of the climax.

Performances : Sagar making his big screen debut is confident for sure but he gets less mark after his obvious comparison with his earlier cameo in Mr. Perfect. The director’s vision of presenting him as a semi- angry young man flatters, when we are shown some cheap action sequences in parallel to romantic scenes. Ragini is just ok but she lacks a sizzling presence on the screen of an urban girl. Kota Srinivasa Rao plays the grandfather role well and Ajay is good in his few sequences. Sakshi Chowdary gets limited scope but she does fine. The rest of the cast offers decent support.

Technicality : The story of Siddhartha is very routine. The script followed popular format of Panjaa, Preminchukundam Raa, Samarasimha Reddy, Indra. The first half of Siddhartha starts off promising, and I was wondering if the film would be bold enough to dwell on to politics, mining mafia, factionism that very few films have managed as yet to take a closer look at. For a few minutes at least it did seem as if this film would do the unthinkable. Sadly, however, nothing of the sort happens, and you realize that this is the story of a man who stands to lose everything in his life. Its an account of his dejection, frustrations and depression and his inability to express any of these. As it is “Siddhartha” turns out to be tale of a miserable faction life, lived and almost lost to the jibes thrown at it incessantly from all around.

It’s a firm and steep decline for the film from the moment Sahashra turns pregnant. It starts telling you things that you have seen thousands of times already, and which you are in no mood to further lend your ear & eyes.Technically, the film has a fine cinematography but reminds you of many similar movies too since it moves around the faction and romance background. Music by Mani Sharma is very mediocre and background score is good at times. Editing of the film should have been better and could have been reduced around 20-25 minutes of movie’s runtime. Production value of Dasari Kiran Kumar is grand for this minimal scripted film.

Verdict : To be fair to “Siddhartha”, 2 years that it has taken to make it to the screens do not really show. But that’s simply enough, and the story of a good hearted gangster is plainly big yawn.

Rating : 1/5

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