Gandeevadhari Arjuna Review

You might say director Praveen Sattaru has made a mark in Telugu cinema. His movies are instantly recognisable for their urban aesthetic, metrosexual heroes, and fast-paced action sequences. Sadly, that's not all they are known for. As we saw in Ghost (2022), and see now again in Gandheevadhari Arjuna, he uses every old spy-agent-action-hero trope in the book to tell his stories. Stripped of authenticity, his characters, even at their most vulnerable, are unrelatable and shallow. You don't care about these people because their backstories are full of far-fetched coincidences.

Take the protagonist Arjun Varma (Varun Tej), an Indian intelligence officer posted in London. He signs up for a high-risk security gig to pay for his mother's medical treatment - she is so sick that her skin peels off in layers, her internal organs scarred from "toxic chemicals". She must be kept isolated at a top hospital in London. There is a tender moment between mother and son when Arjun visits her in the hospital and promises to take her back to India knowing that she may never recover - it is one of the precious few delicate scenes in the movie.

But thereafter, the coincidences begin to add up till they enter of realm of impossibility. Arjun's assignment is to guard Raj Bahadur (Nasser), India's Minister for Environment, who happens to be in London for a UN Summit on climate change. Minister Raj, in turn, happens to be working to expose a corrupt organization C&G, that also happens to be responsible for Arjun's mother's fate. The CEO of C&G happens to be related to Raj. Oh, and Raj's chief of staff Ira (Sakshi Vaidya) happens to be Varun's ex-girlfriend. One coincidence is cool, two coincidences are twice as cool, but three or more? That's farcical.

The movie's tame action sequences don't pick up the slack in the story, either. At best, these are cheap imitations of Hollywood spy thriller gunfights. Ostensibly, "Gadheevadhari" is a mythological reference to Arjuna's bow used at an opportune time in the Mahabharatha. But you wouldn't have guessed it from Arjun's insipid gun work, which like most of the details in the movie is tacked on with no true purpose.

Perhaps the only consistently good element of the film are Arjun's costumes. Varun Tej looks the part in his sharp suits, skinny ties and crew cut, speed walking to places with faux intensity. But black leather jackets and Mustang cars don't an agent make. And Varun's incompetence shows in scenes where his face rather than his tall figure is in focus.

The film's love angle - a backstory of Arjun and Ira's live-in relationship - is a truncated tangent that does little to get you excited about their reunion. Although Sattaru's women are not exactly arm candy - they tend to be "strong" women in tight ponytails - they don't serve any authentic purpose, either. Ira hovers on the sidelines shooting daggers through Arjun's back, but it is only a matter of time before she runs into his arms. At least there are no unnecessary songs, but the ear-splitting background score saturates every cell in your body, till you reach the point of numb acceptance.

The bits of Gandheevadhari Arjuna that are salvageable are so few and far between that they stand out against the sea of mediocrity. Vimala Raman who plays Raj's daughter, for example, has little screen time, but she stays in memory for her authentic performance (and she is such an Archie Panjabi lookalike, I had to Google right away to see if it in fact was Panjabi making her Tollywood debut).

Gandheevadhari Arjuna seems written to cover all bases - action, romance, drama, thriller, comedy (30 seconds of a pants-less Abhinav Gomatam dancing by the bathroom), and even a social message about how India has become the dumping ground of the world's waste - but the movie is somehow curiously lesser than the sum of all the parts. Sattaru wants us to believe in the nobility of the film's message, but by the end it comes off as a big-budget PSA. The "message" is just another hack - as exploitative of our attention as an unwarranted item song.