Sai Dharam Tej and Mehreen Prizada Kaur with BVS Ravi as the director came forward to make an action-oriented film, Jawaan. Prasanna as the Villain and friendship between a completely selfish and truly patriotic person as the sub-plot movie tries to explore the core relationship between a human and a superhero! How and why?? Read on to find out …
Plot : We are introduced to Jai (Sai Dharam Tej) and Keshav (Prasanna) as two schoolmates and friends who live inside by side houses. Jai is the son of Ramachandra Murthy (Jaya Prakash) the school teacher and he early finds out that Keshav is on a wrong track as the kid. He gets attracted to violence and also tries to steal question paper with the help of Jai. Jai denies to help him and Keshav is infuriated by him. Keshav is thrown out of the school and he decides to move so far and fast ahead of Jai that he can never a be a throne in his path.
Jai wants to become a research scientist at DRDO and he keeps preparing by asking everyone to keep him updated about the current affairs and personality-related questions. He answers to each and every one of their questions. He also is an RSS soldier who believes that at least from one home one person should work like a soldier. He is motivated by Koteswara Rao (Kota Srinivasa Rao) to be more and more responsible to society. One hand he accidentally stops Keshav’s men who are after Koteswara Rao for a DRDO stamp and later fails their mission after they kill the elderly man. Keshav decides to stay in Jai’s home and operate. Can Jai overpower Keshav? What is the mission and who will finally win this cat and mouse game? Watch it on the screen to know the details …
Performances : Sai Dharam Tej is energetic and delightfully controlled in this character of Jai. In bringing out a focused and no-nonsense character he is much better than his Winner here but a bit too plain in few scenes where he needed to show a bit more emotion. But for him, this is a welcome change from imitating Chiranjeevi and Pawan Kalyan in few scenes. He sticks to his character and better if he chooses to continue in this way and then occasionally drop a hint or two for fans to rejoice.
Mehreen Prizada is used for songs and as the team also clearly stated that in the pre-release promotions. We can discount that fact and hope heroines do find some good stuff in films like these too. She is cute and performed well in her scenes. Prasanna has a great screen presence but he is limited to walking with a cruel look and sharp face, into the light from dark even after he is completely known. The actor could have been a little more for his character as jr is a capable actor. He did deliver what he is asked for in his scenes.
Kota Srinivas Rao, Jaya Prakash, Satyam Rajesh, Subbaraju are adequate in their roles. The impact though the director wanted to create with Kota Srinivasa Rao and Subbaraju is missing.
Technicalities : Basic premise and plot of this movie are nothing new. Even the romantic track and cat n’ mouse chase are as routine as you can predict it right from the moment the film enters into the story. Many logical flaws harm the progress as they use them to highlight the hero more and more than keep the movie grounded in solid logic and tie it up with the tension they wanted to create. In a film, funnier like Main Hoon Na, the tension between the hero and disguised villain is well maintained in short span. Here writers BVS Ravi, Kalyan Varma, Sai Krishna and Vamsi, tried to stage their entire film on this tension but it gets repetitive as Dhruva used the same trick in a new and effective way.
To make a slick action thriller, you need the background to be set up really well in this global village where people are exposed to many more movies. Still trying to figure out a way to bring in songs if necessary or not, then trying to figure out what else can we do with villain entering into the frame trying to raise the stakes every minute with logic out of the window has been the go-to formula for our filmmakers. We got so used to this formula that performances and situations needed to be more imaginative than naive. Writers needed to put in more efforts in this matter.
KV Guhan comes up with a neat color palette and dark n’ light theme for the story. He tries to play with shadows and uses concepts that bring out the characters. But he does try same concepts in scenes and they tend to get repetitive after a point than exciting. Even the director did not give him much scope but he needed to push some more as he looked more inclined to stylizing each frame than giving more scope to perform.
Editor, SR Sekkhar is good in keeping the romance parts at a bare minimum and then cutting action pieces. But he really needed to look out for scenes that repeat the motives much more. As the hero and villain seem to be telling out the same thing and circling around without much progress some scenes that harm the build-up could have been cut out to keep it even tighter.
Music by SS Thaman is loud and clearly more reworked from his early works. His songs are not so much original and his background score to brings Mankatha and many other films to mind. He does seem to be out of inspiration when it comes to scoring to films these days.
Director BVS Ravi, tries to follow the rule book of Telugu Cinema that hero needs to have this kind of an introduction scene, this kind of a motive but fails to create everything with a purpose. He makes major flaws in setting up the conflict. Even though the premise looks more menacing a decade ago, while developing it for this generation he needed to use more imaginative ways to keep the conflict interesting and also give actors more scope to push the boundaries. In order to keep pushing the final reveal to pre-climax, he loses out on creating more exciting moments. He keeps his hero passive even after him showing an aggressive streak of success in taking things into his hand. Even in the climax, the hero seems to be more reactive than active and in these films, such passive streak hurts the character of the protagonist and stales antagonist too.
Analysis : Confining himself to the bare minimum risk factor and keeping the simple logic too out of the script, the director doesn’t really use Sai Dharam Tej’s energy in the right way. Still, he conjures up an old tale in a more plausible way than pushing the more unwilling spectator of today to run to the theatres to catch this octopus driven cat and mouse game. He needed to deliver much more proactive characters to let the audience come out with a satisfaction of chasing a puzzle. Rather they end up feeling like they watched a regular commercial film said in a more serious tone. Watchable due to Sai Dharam Tej and Prasanna.
Rating : 2/5
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