Even his most ardent fan would agree that Ram Charan is no Chiranjeevi or Kamal Haasan. In fact, there is a facetious reference to the latter when, after assaulting the wrong person for sexual misconduct, Chiranjeevi pacifies him by comparing him to Kamal Haasan.
Nothing can pacify us, the audience, as we suffer the cacophonic chaos of Ram Charan’s universe in this callow and shallow political thriller, Game Changer, which opens with an upturned heist attempt foiled by our hero. The prologue is so shamefully shoddy you can’t help wondering what happened to director Shankar, who once made Hindustani and Nayak. Now, he is scraping the bottom of the barrel with Kamal Haasan and Ram Charan,
At least Hindustani 2 had Kamal Haasan to lift the bland scenes that tumbled out uninterrupted. In Game Changer the only game changing that Ram Charan does is to slide down to the bottom of the barrel and then peer sheepishly from the barrell’s opening waiting for the writers to tell him what to do.
Game Changer seems to lean into ludicrousness from the word go. The dance at the beginning, where the hero prances (he thinks he dances, but little does he know) with chorus dancers in various costumes performing different dance forms (none of which I could recognize), displays Ram Charan’s dancing skills at their most disadvantageous.
Wait, I am trying to be polite here. I know this superstar has hugely possessive fans. So why doesn’t he respect the audience more? Who wrote this inane plot about an honest IPS officer, Ram Nandan (at one point, he is repeatedly heard calling himself an IAS officer, but we will go with the Khaki uniform), about a dishonest murderous chief minister and his even more dishonest murderous son (S. J Suriyah) who disrupts parliamentary activities with such constant impunity we wonder why they don’t expel him for doing a sham mimicry of how real parliamentarians behave.
S. J Suriyah plays the Acting Chief Minister… and boy is he acting! It’s like a game of over-acting versus non-acting between the villain and the hero. While we, the audience, pray for them to stop whatever they are doing, the volume of noise on the soundtrack tries to drown out all rational thought: we are just supposed to go with the tidal flow.
In the second half, Ram Charan adds a stammer to his woozy woodenness to play Ram Nandan’s father. Yes, the actor figures in a double role. The second half stumbles over stock politicians’ characters who are so corrupt that they seem to suggest that politics is no longer about corruption and criminality; it is an arena of full-time hooliganism.
If there is no redemption for politics, there doesn’t seem to be any for cinema on politics either.
Oh by the way, there is Kiara Advani in the film. If you promise not to step out for a loo break, the film promises a glimpse or two of her.
