Kodi Ramakrishna with Ammoru, Anji, Devi, Arundhathi, Trinetram and many more took the socio-fantasy genre in Telugu films in one direction that is using VFX to create huge Demons and again using VFX creating Gods to destroy them. Sharabha attempts the same thing but could it equally good as any of the mentioned films?
Plot : Youngster Sharabha (Ashwini Kumar) meets Divya (Mishti). They both fall in love even though Divya’s family are thieves. Sharabha changes them and they get to know that Divya is the ideal virgin girl for sacrifice and a huge demon king, Chandraksha (Charandeep) is looking for her.
Parvathamma (Jayapradha) alarms his son Sharabha to be careful and asks him to leave the place. But an old villager Narayana (L.B. Sriram) identifies her and tells the story of Singarayakonda village that used to have Karthavarayudu (Napoleon) father of Sharabha as the head.
Karthavarayudu dies trying to build a temple for Sharabha Narasimha at the place as Demon King Rudraksha attacks the place. Both Karthavaraya and Rudraksha die in the battle and now, Sharabha needs to stop Chandraksha and save the village, Divya. How he does that forms the rest of the story?!.
Performances : Ashwini Kumar cannot act. He first needs to learn the craft to take the ambition of being a good actor or a popular star in films forward. Jayapradha is given a bad role but she did her best to make it appealing. She is the best thing to happen to this film.
Misthi Chakraborthy can only put expression 5, expression 8 when asked to laugh, look cute and angry. She needs to improve from them. Napoleon is good. Rest all others are adequate.
Technicalities : Koti seems to have used all the tunes that have been rejected by Arundhathi makers here. The music is so old and outdated that even he wouldn’t be able to say when did he really scored them.
Ramana Salwa, the cinematographer of the film worked hard with VFX department and art department to create decent visuals for the budget. But he needed better actors and script.
Kotagiri Venkateswara Rao could have trimmed down a lot of inconsequential scenes and also the portions that just stretch too much.
Narasimha Rao wrote and directed the film. He seems to be a great fan of Kodi Ramakrishna. Rather than learning the conviction that the popular director posses, he seems to have learned how to create over the top villains and even over the top sequences just to make the audience believe in the sentiments and blind beliefs. He couldn’t really pull them off in a convincing way.
Analysis : Many of us believe in God and Demon. Even though science tries to give a different explanation to things, we just believe in the mystery of unexplained than proofs that explain things. The debate goes on regarding the issues in real life. But in films, it is good fun to let ourselves transported into a world of the youngster who believes in Demons and Gods without any second thoughts.
This film anyhow doesn’t really tap into the youngster’s world view. It is so atrociously waste of an opportunity and money that people will even laugh at certain things even if it is played on TV. We have been watching such stories regularly on TV these days with better screenplays that we feel sorry for VFX artists and Jayapradha, who have put in their sincere efforts.
Rating : 1.5/5 (for VFX)
