A slice of life making style works in any language Cinema, because it tries to bring the culture of that area and also reflect the life style of the people there. But when you decide to remake such kind of a film, you need to be highly careful and should reflect on its dramatic highs and lows to sync them to the audience of your language. Even though Meda Mida Abbayi has an important message about online fraud, it seems too lazily written and made. Let’s see why so and what went wrong…
Plot : Young Srinu (Allari Naresh) is not a rich brat but a brat who is spoilt by his mother as he doesn’t really understand the need to be responsible in life. He thinks becoming a filmmaker is very easy as he can’t clear his backlogs in Engineering Degree. He has a friend, Babji (Hyper Adi) who encourages his ideas. Due to fear of his father, he runs away from home to become a director. But he returns back in a week from the big city unable to find a route for survival. Upon his return he is greeted by severe abuses and beating by his father and neighbours for absconding with Sindhu (Nikhila Vimal). What happened to Sindhu? Why did villagers think he ran away with her? How all this related to Detective Yugandhar (Avasarala Srinivas)? You need to watch the movie to know the answers ..
Performances : Allari Naresh who has been an asset for simpleton comedy films looked completely out of form here. He tried to imitate Nivin Pauly from original and failed to re-produce the same charm, the other actor could in the Original. Nikhila Vimal failed to liven up the screen and her dull attitude did not help her role in anyway. Hyper Aadi fails to utilise the opportunity of a full length character in a comedy movie. He tries to bring his “Jabardasth”-ness on screen but that doesn’t really sync with the mood of the film.
All other actors are just adequate to the requirement of the movie.
Technicalities : Story and Screenplay by Vineeth Srinivasan is not fool-proof and trying to just re-create what made Oru Vadakkan Selfie a hit in Malayalam did not work in Telugu. It needed that peppy going vibe and also corrections to the logical loop holes. Rather makers decided to not even change a joke and that is very unfortunate. Kunjuni’s Cinematography works very well but the makers seema to have made the movie in original movie’s locations than trying out the Godavari districts authenticity. Anyways, his camera work is good.
Shaan Rahman’s score did not really go in sync with the movie here. It might have clicked in the original but just using the same tunes even for this movie just shows the lack of effort on the team’s part. G. Prajit, the director of the original, directed the remake too in similar fashion. Bit he could not bring the same liveliness of the original even though he copy pasted it shot to shot. The major USP of the original was it’s nativity and simple narration even though it was slow. But here it needed to bring out more native emotions that are true to Godavari districts youth but he failed to understand. One cannot completely blame him too as he is an alien to this ethnicity.
Analysis : Meda Mida Abbayi is an example of an actor and his producer, being desperate to make a box office movie rather than really trying to make something that strikes a chord with audience. It is a collective failure in adapting a simple coherent story that worked in one language to another. You can easily ignore this Meda Mida Abbayi.
Rating : 1.5/5
