After wading through the slush in Prabhas’ new film, I have to admit the mega-star needs a serious script doctor to guide him. The man evidently has no script sense. His track record of purported epics gone horribly wrong warrants a full-fledged investigative committee.
The gentleman who wrote The RajaSaab (incontestably, Prabhas’ career worst, though there is no telling about the future) should donate his brain to science to further the future of human civilization.
How on earth did writer-director Maruthi come up with a concoction so terrible and incoherent? More importantly, how did Prabhas green-light this absurd excursion into infantility?
It would be senseless to try and make sense of the plot. Suffice to say, Prabhas’s Raja suffers from Grandma issues. Grandma Zarina Wahab (the only actor who takes the three-hour joke seriously) suffers from husband issues: understandable when your husband is a ghost, and not a dost at all. Prabhas has a lot of scenes with his screen grandma. Zarina Wahab has fun with her part. But to watch Prabhas skip hop and dance around her like a school kid is painfully embarrassing.
To prove that the man-child has a healthy adult libido, there are three heroines for Prabhas to choose from. He shares icy zero-level chemistry with all the romantic leads, Riddhi Kumar, Nidhi Grewal, and Malavika Mohanan, each more distracted than the other, each pretending to be insanely in love with Raja (Saab). But you know they couldn’t care less.
Everyone seems to be in this for the heck of it. As though they knew the project was doomed from the start. But what the heck! If you are paid to do your job, you just do it and be done with it. The slipshod direction, with many a slip between the cup and the lip, is a masterclass in moronic movie-making. The juvenile acting reinforces the feeling of unmitigated anarchy (like Bhool Bhulaiya gone South).
Whenever Prabhas is unsure of what to do—can’t blame him when the screenplay is a ruse for free-falling revelry—he does a very awkward hand dance that must have thrilled the team while shooting. It’s like Dilip Kumar in Gopi without the fun element.
Prabhas’s presence fails to lift the pulverized proceedings, as there is nothing to lift. The plot is populated with incidents that belong to a Doordarshan series from the time when the television content creators were ghost-writers.
This brings me to Sanjay Dutt as a ghost. I wish he had more fun with his part. Dutt seems constrained by the absence of coherence in the presentation. I can imagine poor Dutt asking the writer-director why he is made to do the things that he does. Is there a revenge angle which Dutt is not aware of?
The rest of the vast cast hang around in a heathen haveli housing howlers that transcend from horror to ridiculousness in a sickening subversion of the spirit of carpe diem.
At the end of the ordeal, I patted myself on the back for sticking around till the end in this senseless synthesis of scares and laughter, where the funniest and scariest element is that there is nothing remotely scary or funny. It is all just trashy timepass. The special effects are so tacky they seem to be generated on a smartphone, not smart enough, though.
