Andari Kosam Review

Andari Kosam is what the title suggests. Rather than a 'nee kosam' or 'naa kosam' style love story with a few scenes that range from spicy to smutty, and fit into the plot, this is a movie about corruption and the social conscience and a few totally risque scenes that do not belong anywhere in the story at all.

Andari Kosam is about the media and police joining hands together against corruption. Srinath is Ravi, who, after studying mass-communication abroad, has come back to Hyderabad and set up AP TV. He has an abundance of bottle-cap-sized spy-cams, and has decided that the best way to fight corruption is to film anyone who is upto anything. And then telecast the filming live on his home-channel. Happily, therefore, instead of too many bullets and bombs going off, Andari Kosam has nimble-footed cameraman limboing in and out of crime scenes, springing out of every dark nook or cranny in the surroundings.

And when cameras are too big, there are the baby-cams which Ravi and his crew keep taping everywhere. Jawaharlal Nehru's words about 'shooting with a camera' become sacred, as Pramod Sharma tries to substitute a smoking gun with a bunch of chunky cameras with trailing wires, held over the shoulders of the cameramen, as the centrepiece of the movie.

Then there is a syndicate of criminals who deal in drugs, arms and prostitution, and who simply cannot stay ahead of Ravi's nosey cameras. His arm-candy is played by Charu Singh, who, for most scenes, stands behind him with a demure look in her eyes.

Inspector Sivaji is the good cop who has common interests with Ravi. He goes around arresting and shooting goons with the same expression that the 15th century Nizams had on their faces while getting their portraits done – serene and clueless. He cracks up into a smile a couple of times, one of them being when Keerti Chawla does a rain sequence in a chiffon sari in order to court him. This, among others, is one of the pointlessly sizzling scenes that appear across the movie without any whyfor.

Jeeva plays a CID chief, and then there is ACP Avinash, another good cop. These two also belong to the good syndicate. Between filming with cameras, and a little punching and kicking and killing a few unnecessary characters (like Keerti Chawla's parents), the movie manages to progress by a few inches every hour. The last scene is, of course, the good guys uninterruptedly filming the villians with their cameras, like an army of soldiers at a firing squad. That's symbolic and all. Remember what Nehru said?

Between the significant characters in the movie (approximately 15 in all), it is very very hard to figure out what the last few paragraphs have so elegantly captured. There are cops, sub-cops and lowest-rung cops; goons, sub-goons and insignificant goons; and so on and so forth. Each character has that niggling bit of influence that lets him pull the story along another hairpin bend before it resumes its course. It is as complicated as the Mahabharatha, but as torturous as the Mahabharatha is interesting.

In other words, a movie that is a must-avoid. B-grade this movie definitely is, but in a way that is hardly titillating. Which completely defeats the purpose of sleazy cinema altogether. Who wants to learn about social evils and how to combat them from a wonky movie that has no clue why it was made? All in all, easily one of the most empty movies to hit the screen in a long time. Empty of purpose, entertainment, thrills and whatever else is possible for a movie to offer. It deserves the empty cinema halls that are running it.