Avunanna Kaadanna Review

It's hard not to go to a Teja film with expectations, since you know exactly what to expect. Zillions of plot loopholes, to start with. Novice lead actors with no vibrancy in emotions. A 20-year-old superman for hero, who, given his superpowers to beat up multiple armed musclemen single-handedly, can just skunk the baddies and end the film right at the beginning, but chooses to wait till the film ends. And the same story that you saw in Nuvvu Nenu, Jayam and Dhairyam - and in a gazillion films since Shakespeare made the first talkie. (Oh, stop being fussy - we saw this film.)

The film starts with Ramu (Uday Kiran) going to Lanka to reclaim the land that his father was robbed of by the local tyrant Mangaraju (Pilla Prasad). He starts in the most logical way - he asks Mangaraju to return it. Mangaraju does exactly what you'd expect him to do - he returns it. This frankly was the right time to end the film. But nobody listens to us, and the film goes on for 2 hours and 15 minutes more.

Ramu realizes that the land given to him is absolutely barren terrain, but gamely decides to take up the challenge and cultivate it. The beginning of the loopholes - if he came to reclaim his land, he should have fought for the actual land his father cultivated and lost, rather than decide to cultivate some unploughable patch doled out to him. What is he trying to prove?

Anyway, he keeps running into Aravinda (Sadaf), Mangaraju's grand-daughter, who keeps taunting him to do impossible things. First she asks him to push a boulder slightly less than the size of the earth, and when he does it, she further challenges him to steal her granddad's walking stick. He does this, too, and then it's her dad's ring she wants. And when he gets caught during this operation and is beaten black and blue, she finally falls in love with him. Why couldn't she have done this right in the beginning, and avoided all this? Everything goes wrong in a Teja movie!

Flippancy apart, the romance is desolately characterless, as are the protagonists themselves. It's left to the viewers to project the evolution of emotions onto the sequence of scenes unfolding on the screen, since there are no script-generated magical moments.

The second half shows how Ramu observes severe austerities and penances to propitiate Lord Shiva, who is pleased and gives him the power to defeat the whole of Mangaraju's army single-handedly. C'mon, we wouldn't lie. Okay, fine, even Teja's films aren't so unrealistic - Ramu just defeats all of Mangaraju's army single-handedly. He then marries Aravinda, but remember that it's only in the movie.

Sadaf is good-looking, and acts fairly well. Almost all other supporting performances are good, and Dharmavarapu Subrahmanyam stands out. The music is typical Teja film score - it can be a hit only if the film is a hit, and that doesn't look likely at all. The film bores you without pausing for breath.

Good script-writing is not about making your hero a superman everytime he gets into a situation. Teja's films are stricken for ideas - and that is contagious, so don't go in here.