Amigos Review

We open to a nighttime scene set outdoors. Two men, soaked to the bones from the pouring rain, are scrambling for a gun. One of them grabs it and points it at the other. The camera reveals a face shuddering in fear as it stares down the barrel. Now we pan to the gunman's face. Lo and behold - they are the same! The shooter and the victim are identical, down to the last beard hair. Cut to TITLE: Amigos.

With dramatic pauses and long expositions, Amigos acts like it is the first film to have the idea to use doppelgangers in its premise, but Tolly cinema has been dabbling in this genre for ages. It is a near certainty that our heroes will do a double-action role at some point in their careers. All the greats - Chiranjeevi, Nagarjuna, Venkatesh - have done it. Balakrishna, being India's Chuck Norris, has done an absurd fifteen such movies; it's only right his nephew, Kalyan Ram, lives up to the Nandamuri name and does one too. But Kalyan, or rather Amigos' writer and director Rajendra Reddy, asks: why just two Kalyans when we can have three?

The very first thing - really the only thing Amigos wants you to know - is that its triple-action concept is not some woo-woo supernatural stuff or serendipity. It is grounded in the reality of the existence of doppelgangers - unrelated people that look identical. You will hear the word used over and over again. The film's opening credits are a montage of newspaper articles about lookalikes discovering each other. One of its opening scenes features a guy (Sapthagiri) explaining what a doppelganger is to the protagonist Siddharth (Kalyan). They are at a noisy nightclub when this stranger from the next table walks over with an open laptop and does a short demo (again, in a nightclub) about a website called getdoppel.com (it actually exists, I checked) where people can search for their lookalikes. Siddharth is so keyed up by this idea that he goes home and enlists on the website. By the next morning, he gets two matches.

One is a timid Kannadiga named Manjunath. Another is a Bengali mystery man named Michael. The three men meet in Goa, and over the course of a skippity song where they behave like school children (holding hands and hopping around), they become besties. Manju and Michael even help Siddharth land his dream girl, Ishika (Ashika).

But their happy triad comes undone when Michael is revealed to be the nefarious leader of a gun cartel. A merchant of death. An "Indian Pablo Escobar", as the NIA police officer on Michael's tail calls him. Michael's true intent behind befriending his doppelgangers becomes apparent. And the second half of the film plays out Siddharth's pursuit of Michael.

Now think of all the tricks you could pull when you have not one but two lookalikes for a character. But the story doesn't have a single aha moment or unexpected twist. The script is awful. Typical "audiences are idiots" stuff that assumes we will gobble up any nonsense without asking questions.

Amigos has so many Kalyan with Kalyan with Kalyan scenes, it's fair to say it's Kalyan's cross to bear for its shoddy outcome. First, to the cinematographer's credit, the CGI in these triple-Kalyan scenes is well done, partly due to clever framing. But what is unbearable is Kalyan's acting. To play three distinct personalities, he does little more than modulate the tone of his voice and the size of his pupils. As Manju, he is a soprano with googly eyes; as Siddharth a tenor with kind eyes; and as Michael (my favorite of the three for being so uniquely terrible) he talks in baritone, with his eyes half-closed. Kalyan tries to create a lecherous and sadistic Michael, but despite having him in a man bun, a salt-and-pepper beard and flashy tats, he doesn't command the screen presence of even a side character.

Ashika Ranganath is an equally dull heroine, but worse, she appears childlike and immature next to the uncle-y Kalyan Ram.

Brahmaji plays Siddharth's friendly mama, but really, he is All of Us when his character buries his head in his hands and asks "ee doppelganger gola enti ra babu" - he gets unwantedly pulled into the mess anyway.

Amigos is triple the action, triple the anguish. As you may have guessed, at least I had no problem picking a rating for this movie.