How does one evaluate Pushpa 2: The Rule dispassionately without falling into the trap of stating the obvious? Let’s get straight to the point. This is an awful, repeat, awful film with no sense of aesthetics (the colour scheme varies from episode to episode, depending on which lens the cameraman fancies) and with not a hint of restrain tact or wisdom in telling a story that should never have been told.
What is the point of saying the performances, the art direction (as fey as the protagonist) and the sound design (as loud as dear Pushpa) are so jarring, you want to flee from the theatre. People around you in the theatre are restless , they are laughing at the supposedly serious scenes, as I wonder what I should say about this execrable “film” (more like a live circus) that would be polite
Then I come up with this: the attempts to show the dreaded gangster so putty in his wife’s hands, is cute. Rashmika Mandanna is definitely more in charge here as the wife than she was in Animal. Yeah, she wears the pants between the two of them (simple to do since he only wears lungis), forces her husband to have sex whenever she gets the feeling(marital rape has two sides) and generally has him under control.
There is also the Maa Kali dance, the venture’s unmistakable centrepiece, where Allu Arvind gets into a saree (yes!) , jewellery and elaborate Goddess makeup to dance the night away.
It is an impressive digression , but a digression nonetheless. Why is it part of this boorish bedlam, a hurrah to hooliganism, an exercise in self-glorification for a hero who is as “heroic” as your neighbourhood Dada who thinks he is a dogooder, who doesn’t seem to bathe and paints his pinky to let us know he is good with gender bending.
In fact, Allu Arjun gets into a saree twice for crucial sequences, once when his wife announces her pregnancy and then again for the climax when Pushpa must rescue his niece from malefactors. The climactic fight in a kanjeevaram saree is not a routine whistle blower. It is a winking homage to whatsapp feminism.
It is a brave thing to do for Allu Arjun. But I don’t see saree sales increasing. Pushpa 2: The Rise gives you nothing to take home, let alone hold close to your heart. It is terribly constructed with characters , barring Pushpa’s wife, that are strictly cardboard cutouts.
The plot too skimpy and trite to be called convoluted, is written with just one agenda: to make Allu Arjun look like the perfect lout. The slouch is still there. But the performance is self-referential doing more , much more, of what he has already done in the first instalment but with more italics and less punctuations.
As a straightforward potboiler about a South Indianized Robin Hood, his spirited Marian and the merry (unwashed) bandits, Pushpa 2: The Rule falls way short of expectations. Even Allu Arjun’s introductory sequence on a dockyard in Japan tries too hard for the swag. Like love, swag kiya na jata ho jata hai. A truism that the makers of this film forget to follow.
What we get is a film that tries too hard. This is an exhausting, exasperating, tortuous test of patience.
