Allari Pidugu Review

Balakrishna plays twin brothers Ranjith and Giri, the sons of an Army Colonel (Puneet Issar). Issar actually plays Duryodhan in this movie, as the father of Giri. Constantly berating him for being a good-for-nothing, scolding him, whacking him, thrashing him and on and on and on he goes, not leaving Giri alone for a minute, for no fault of his except that he is a wee bit wayward.

Ranjith on the other hand wins all prizes in school, and Puneet Issar is an excellent father to him. Before they both grow up, the Colonel becomes a prisioner of war in Pakistan and disappears from the scene, and the two kids are left to mature into the two Balakrishnas.

They are twins, of course – the same bushy sideburns and moustaches on both faces and the same fluffy whorl on the foreheads. But Giri the goonda (Balakrishna 1) adopts the petite Subbalakshmi (Charmi) as his lady love, while ACP Ranjith (Balakrishna 2) picks Swati (Katrina Kaif).

Between their gallivanting around trees, (and it's quite a sight to watch the Balakrishna's gunny sack figure beside Charmi's bundle and Kaif's hourglass, ferociously executing the same lithe moves) and saving the world (Giri through his goondagiri, and ACP Encounter Ranjith through his staged encounters), they manage to go through nearly half the movie.

This is when you realise that this is one of those movies that probably doesn't have a story. It’s a soap opera. The kind where everyday happenings, the little things in life, form the story. The kind where you are supposed to get excited about Swati's dressing or Giri's ability to shoot a marble with his mouth and burst an earthen pot with it.

So Swati keeps turning up in stunning clothes and Giri breaks pots with marbles, while Ranjith stages encounters and keeps blowing the brains out off dangerous criminals – until their father, the missing Colonel, suddenly makes a reappearance on the screen after 14 years. To the family, he was allegedly in Pakistan, but we viewers are let in on the secret that he has been in Tihar jail all this while, for murder.

Then there are the real goondas in the movie (Rahul Dev etc.), who keep creating trouble as constantly and painfully as a case of bad shoe-bite. One one hand, it was they who got Issar into jail through a conspiracy to get him wrongly tried for his own friend's murder. On the other hand, they are making ACP Ranjit's life hell by stretching their long arms from the Indian border, all the way to Hyderabad, to organise bank scams, gun smuggling and what not. Encounter Ranjit does manage to keep up with his encounters, but no matter how many of these insects he kills, it just doesn't seem like enough.

Then, as the last straw, the bunch of criminals decide to break the family by getting Giri arrested for goondagiri just when he is trying to change to please his father. All in all, this movie boasts the most pesky bunch of baddies you've ever seen. The kind who make you want to jump right into the screen and just strangle them with all your force.

Well, finally, of course, all the hooligans are beaten and belabored as much as you feel they deserve. But the boringly tortuous path you have to take to get here is what kills the fun. Altogether. By the time the goondas are being thrashed, by the time the good people are being rescued, you are snoring away waiting for the time to come. By the time the titles are up, you are in the REM stage. And by the time the theater ushers are jostling you, you are in a dreamless blackhole.

What can we say? Balakrishna's latest is rather outdated. And indifferent. There is hardly anything that salvages it - no kickass dialogues, not too many sexy foreign locales. And Balakrishna's dressing, which was never what you watched his movies for anyway, still remains the same.

Unless you are a Balakrishna fan or want to do him a favor, skip this movie this week. Better ones have come and better ones will come (hopefully). Sure you can find yourself something to do in the interval.