Bhayya Review

t's easy to say that a movie is lousy without realizing what goes into making it. Sometimes it's absolutely delightful.

In the short term, the horrible lip-sync in Bhayya kills you (this is a dubbed film). In the long term, the done-to-death storyline does. In the really long term, Vishal will most likely continue to make the same movies - he seems to be funded really well by an indulgent family. Fortunately, in the really long term, as Keynes said, we are all dead.

Bhayya is a typical Vishal film - full of violence where 1 (one) man routinely beats up a dozen dhoti-clad machete-wielding goons. There's nothing much else to the tale - one young man versus the army of a big bad villian who he takes panga with because of a girl. It also successfully sets the bar lower for all further Vishal films, thanks to some really sad comedy in the first half.

Jagan (Vishal) takes on the powerful goon Guna (Ajay) when he's trying to save Malathi (Priyamani) from him. He beats up all of Guna's henchmen and Guna himself to pulp, with Guna even going into coma. Guna's brother and mentor Mallanna (Devraj), a don in Cuddapah, then swears revenge, setting the tone for the rest of the movie as a mixture of a battle of wits and a whole lot of violence.

The first half is too bad for anything to make up for it - it focuses on Jagan trying to win the affections of Malathi, but the comedy is very poorly written (e. g. Vishal seeing an old woman as Malathi while a kid with him sees her as who she is - what was that about?), and featuring as it does only Vishal himself and no professional comic cast, has no life support even. An episode showing a flashback of Ashish Vidyarthi and Urvasi can range from barely tolerable to repulsive depending on how pained you are in general in life. Plus, there are too many jokes featuring old women.

A good bit of all that stuff might have been more bearable if it were part of an original Telugu film featuring familiar Telugu faces - for a dubbed film to work, there has to be something extra in terms of either script or presentation. There's no special effort in the dubbing itself to bring in close lip-sync, and there's plenty of Tamilian dressing and script all over the place. It feel funny when they keep desperately trying to refer to the whole setting of the film as Cuddapah.

The second half of the film is at least routine violence fare, and would get an average rating for itself, but cannot pull it out of the hole the first half plunges it into. The songs feel like unnecessary interruptions, and with there being no hummable tune, the effect gets aggravated.

Vishal is a decent actor, but the expressive Priyamani surprisingly has nothing to do except wear micros in the songs. Another surprise is Nirosha, the heroine of Mani Ratnam's Gharshana, in an insignificant role - what was she doing here? Most performances are decent, and the film visually looks okay, especially compared to the previous Bharani.

You can wait for this one's DVD to come out to watch it, but that would be stupid. Instead, just forget it.