Agnyaathavaasi Review

A little after the half an hour mark comes the breezy 'Gaali Vaaluga' number. And what do you know? People started getting up and walking out of the hall. This fact is all the more incredible considering that it's the first-day-first-show of a Pawan Kalyan film.

Yup, people aren't liking it. But you know, we think we like Agnyaathavasi. We at fullhyd.com often come to face brickbats over this paradoxical situation of the 'Blockbuster Bad-Film'. You pan them and you're a snob who disregards the will of the masses. You rate them high and you're a sell-out who's lost all integrity. And there's really no amount of explaining that'll change any opinions.

But here, with Agnyaathavasi, we have a big star film which is a bad film all right, and it's not going to be a blockbuster either. It's an incredibly glossy, superbly scored and aggressively marketed expensive bore. Phew... what a relief for us.

It is, naturally, a film where Pawan Kalyan is given the task of being Pawan Kalyan and letting everyone know that you shouldn't be messing with Pawan Kalyan. So were his last n films. Anyway, getting to the specifics, a business magnate (Boman Irani) is murdered along with his son (not Pawan Kalyan), and a hidden, secret, stashed away son (Pawan Kalyan) emerges from nowhere attempting to avenge his father's death in the least entertaining way possible.

Why is he hidden, secret and stashed away? Because there wouldn't be a film otherwise.

Also because Trivikram's latest substitute for The Dark Knight, Sherlock Holmes, La Vita e Bella etc is a French film called Largo Winch where the film starts with a business magnate being murdered and a hidden, secret, stashed away son emerging from nowhere to avenge his father's death.

As Telugu film reviewers, we're way past the moral considerations of plagiarism, and we shall make nothing of it aside from letting you know that Largo Winch, the source material that Trivikram apparently thought was worth taking from, is rated 50% on Rotten Tomatoes and 40% in Metacritic. It's a film that already got panned. To spend crores on making a Pawan Kalyan film off this material is like arriving to your exam early, armed with a Parker pen and six refills, and copying from the bloke who's just trying to clear his arrears from last year.

It isn't just this base material (no pun intended). Everything is off. We already told you it's a big bore of a film. It certainly is like watching paint dry. Except, it's like a hundred painters painted a thousand things with the same colour just so you could watch it dry with that much intensity. So much keeps happening in Agnyaathavasi and nothing that you want to watch. Villains keep getting introduced. Comedians keep getting bashed. Heavy dialogues about life and integrity are thrown about as if they'll make up for the lack of context.

And there are two heroines - one who is cast because she's incredibly good-looking and the other because she's a well-connected producer's daughter. Before you can say such things as objectification and nepotism, we will remind you that the heroines fawn over the hero because they find him incredibly good-looking and we anyway know that he's the hero because he's a popular hero's brother.

It's like we can already hear the buzz of angry fans rushing towards us for 'defaming' their hero.

It is here we'd like to ask these fans one simple question. After the glorious run from Suswagatham to Khushi, Pawan Kalyan starred in 16 films of which precisely four can be considered blockbusters. And he makes these strange choices such as Sardar Gabbar Singh, Katamarayudu and now Agnyaathavasi. Forget the rest of us - isn't the hero accountable to even his own fans?