BRO Review

Mark (Sai Dharam Tej) is busy, busy, busy. He barely has time to greet his mother (Rohini) and sisters in the mornings before he rushes out the door for work. Even his girlfriend Ramya (Ketaki Sharma) needs to block time on his calendar for a quickie. Mark's favorite refrain is "Not enough time!". And "not enough time" turns out to be his precise fate when he meets with a road accident and dies on the spot. At the gates of heaven, he meets an enigmatic figure - the god of time (Pavan Kalyan) - and for reasons never explained, this god, whom Mark takes to calling "Bro", grants him one more chance at life. After all, Mark is short for Markandeyulu - the Hindu mythological figure blessed with immortality.

Remade from Samuthirakhani's Tamil movie Vinodhaya Sitham, Bro is a zhuzhed-up Telugu version rewritten to suit Pawan Kalyan's star power. In the original, Samuthirakani plays the god of time with a menacing bent. In Bro, however, Pawan Kalyan is a chill and goofy god. Dressed as a railway station coolie, dancing to Vayyari Bhama from his 1999 hit Thammudu, Pawan Kalyan does his best impression of Pawan Kalyan through the years. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, raps on the hood of a Jeep, and embodies Bheemla Nayak, Sanjay Sahu and Siddhu Siddharth Roy - his greatest roles - all at once.

Marginally more fun than the game of spot-the-movie-reference that Trivikram, the dialogue writer of Bro, tries to get us into, is its brazen political satire. The jabs are somewhat easy to spot because they stand out as eccentric interludes in an otherwise sane storyline. A character Shyam Babu (Prudhvi) at a nightclub dresses like Ambati Rambabu, the YCP minister who loves taking potshots at Pawan Kalyan's political party, and mimics his viral dance moves.

Bro thus pulls double-duty: a film about the fragility of human life that gets co-opted to boost a political persona. At a certain point in the film, Bro launches into a rant about the necessity of death and of making space for new people, and condemning those who think it is their birthright to stick around and accumulate wealth and power. There is no mistaking the veiled threats Pawan Kalyan tries to Trojan Horse into those lines as he utters them.

Gimmicks are, of course, allowed (artistic freedom is a beautiful thing), even welcome, in a film, if they entertain us and don't spin the story out of control. But Bro's gimmicks do just the opposite, turning the movie into a loose assemblage of perplexing scenes that elbow out its core message, which is in fact quite poignant and deserving of more than the final fifteen minutes of air that it gets. The dissonance between the two parallel stories that play out as a result hit me the strongest in a scene where Mark's mother gets hospitalised with Parkinson's but Mark decides not to go and instead hangs out with Bro. A doctor reads out his mother's diagnosis to him over the phone joking that Parkinson's is "a rich people's disease". The film can't quite make out who it is serving - the actors or the audience - and it can't make up its mind about whether it wants to be a comedy or a drama.

While I don't deny Pawan Kalyan's sheer charisma as an actor, and his ability to toy with the boundaries of goofiness in a way that isn't grating, his flavour of performance isn't what this role calls for. Between PK's overenthusiastic interpretation of God/Time, and Sai Dharam Tej's dull, awkward performance as Mark, the emotionality of the underlying storyline goes haywire. We don't know whether to laugh at these people's troubles or feel for them.

Despite trying too hard to please, Bro is ultimately a forgettable film. Its nostalgic filmi references don't land as intended. And its throwback songs and wink-wink dialogues feel like they have been shoehorned into the script at random. It is an example of the awkward result of mixing movies and politics in a way that, I daresay, doesn't seem to benefit either cause all that much.