Appudo Ippudo Eppudo Review

Appudo Ippudo Eppudo is a frothy romantic drama wrapped inside a petty crime comedy that inspires not questions of "appuda? ippuda?" but "enduku? enduku?". Why would director Sudheer Varma follow up something as spunky as Saakini Daakini with such a half-hearted film about a whole lot of nothing?

The film's indifference towards itself is apparent straight away. The meet-cute between Rishi and Tara is one that any washed-up Tollywood writer could conjure in their sleep: Rishi (Nikhil Siddharth) "steals" the bike of Tara (Rukmini Vasanth) to chase down a pickpocket. After Rishi rescues a gold chain from the thief, the two make eyes at each other. This is followed up with a montage of Rishi peeking over parapet walls to see his new crush in the wild; dancing behind her with his arms outstretched as she sashays down a tree-lined avenue shaking her head with faux-irritation thinking "This guuuy, am I right?" A romance sequence so mind-numbingly unoriginal that it is instantly dismissable.

Before long, the film packs its bags and shifts to a foreign location - London - under the pretext that Rishi can fulfil his dreams of becoming a race-car driver there. Tara follows soon after for her "internship in automobiles" and they resume their limp romance. The ongoings are punctuated by the entry of a London don, a sleazy money lender named Badri (John Vijay) whose only intrigue is his penchant for wearing satin lungis. Badri's and Rishi's fates are intertwined by Tulasi (Divyansha Kaushik), a femme fatale, who momentarily infuses the film with a burst of energy.

In a bid to be darkly humorous, the movie uses Viva Harsha who plays Rishi's best friend, to handle its vaguely racist humour like a pro. He shows up one day with a (gorgeous, mind you) Black girlfriend calling her "the best he can do" to her face. Another time, Rishi and he get pulled over by a cop with a beard and decide that he must be a Pakistani.

But at least the humour (when it's not outright cringey) lands better than Rishi's punches do. In a climactic fight, Rishi takes on a group of Badri's men, led by Munna (Ajay) who is Badri's right-hand-man, but the fist-fighting is so sloppy that even the most dynamic camera angles can't cover up its lack of style. It's the same with Rishi's racing scenes which are choppy and heavily scored but still fail to evoke a sense of his talent behind the wheel. Rishi's characterisation as a race driver is actually bewildering considering that in crucial car chasing scenes he drives as anxiously as my mother would.

The conceit of Appudo Ippudo Eppudo is that it is being narrated by a thief (played by Satya) to a fellow conspirator on their way to a burglary. A setup that gives the film an excuse to use voice-overs to handhold us through its beats. And worse, an excuse to cut up its rather superficial plot into an non-linear story.

Nikhil Siddharth and Rukmini Vasanth seem fully aware of the frivolous plot and give their performances the depth they deserve, which is not much at all. Rukmini, an actor known for portraying intensely moving roles (Sapta Sagaralu Dhaati, 2023) seems sheepish in a musty "heroine" role that requires so little use of her talents.

From the film's buffoonish villain to its nonsensical ending, nothing about Appudo Ippudo Eppudo justifies its stacked cast or its reputed director. A London setting, a non-linear storyline, a protagonist with an intriguing job, a bad man with distinctive quirks - the film uses every trick in the book to dress up its pointlessness, but long before the climax, we know better than to treat it as anything more than outdated pap.