Pawan Kalyan desperately needs a blockbuster to consolidate his stardom. This is not that film. The body-count notwithstanding—the fascination down South with headless bodies is worthy of deep research— They Call Him OG is a lame loud and incoherent jumble of tasteless anarchy and excessive impunity.
Sujith, who earlier directed the disastrous Saaho for Prabhas, does no better for Pawan Kalyan. All the characters are mean, toxic, closeted outcastes flaring their nostrils and shooting their guns at the slightest excuse. Blessedly, there are no song breaks, maybe because Pawan Kalyan doesn’t like dancing and singing, especially since in this film his wife (Priyanka Mohan) is a doctor, and she carries her medical coat in her hand everywhere to prove it.
Pawan Kalyan playing a one-man army remains dressed in formal trousers and boots, probably even when sleeping and bathing; he seems a no-nonsense guy (who like Aryan Khan never smiles) trapped in the most nonsensical script of his life, too polite to opt out.
Kalyan plays some kind of a Japanese samurai, the sole survivor in daylight attack monastery, now geared up to take on the arch-villain Omi, played with zero zest and abundant attitude by Emraan Hashmi. For those expecting some fertile face-offs between Kalyan and Hashmi, there is much disappointment in store: the two seldom come anywhere close to a meaningful combat. Unlike Mirai where the stunts were cannily choreographed and contextualized, the fights in They Call Him OG are all over the place.
Director Sujith exercizes little control over the action. He is content to glorify the hero in almost every dialogue that the other characters utter on him, thereby projecting Kalyam as some kind of a force of Nature which the script scarcely allows him to be. Pawan Kalyan’s actions seem stymied by the stiff script which seems to have written itself out without human intervention.
Some of the intended hard-hitting actions end up being unintentionally comic. At one point when a man responsible for a death turns up at the dead man’s condolence meeting, an angry woman attacks him with stick as he dances in pain.
The mayhem is largely incoherent. A plethora of villains saunter in and out barely registering their presence. Editor Navin Nooli seems saddled with unruly footage which he tries to tame with minimal success.
The film suffers from the disease incurable of excess. The efforts to project a simple revenge story as something more substantial by a pounding background score and saturated cinematography don’t seem to hit home in any part of the lengthy narrative.
What works are the repudiation of standard Telugu diversions like comic relief and item songs. Pawan Kalyan surrenders to the director’s vision of a blood-soaked bleak and blurred world of crime and no punishment in the earlier millennium, when everybody had more time to be more self indulgent. The end-result is hackneyed and knock-kneed.
