Keedaa Cola Review

Eight nutty characters fight over a precious bottle of cola. Inside it? A plump cockroach. Among this wild bunch, there are Vasu (Chaitanya Rao Madadi), his buddy "Lancham" (Rag Mayur) and his grandpa (Brahmanandam). Vasu has Tourette's Syndrome, grandpa has a leaky bladder, and Lancham has a loud mouth. Their bottle of "Keedaa Cola" is their golden ticket to financial freedom. But another gang has the very same idea - there's the adorable dim-wit Sikandar (Vishnu Oi); small-time politician with a big ego Jeevan (Jeevan Kumar); and fresh out of Chanchalguda jail, the mastermind of this scam, Naidu (Tharun Bhascker). Meanwhile, the cockroach is days away from dissolving in the cola and erasing their dreams of a big fat settlement check from the soda company. The stakes are high, the clock is ticking.

Tharun Bhascker's crime-comedy, which takes a page from Guy Ritchie's playbook, is crawling with eccentric characters placed in bizarre situations. These characters meet at coffee shops and in deserted landscapes, trying to cut deals and one-up each other for possession of the bottle. Apart from the eight notorious main characters, other eccentric characters scuttle about, some popping in for just a scene or two, like a deaf hitman or a cross-eyed sniper. While an ugly life-sized doll nicknamed "Barbie" - the only "female' character in the film - hangs in the background.

Tharun's signature gags are all over this film. Characters try to communicate in broken English to great comedic effect. "Surrender" becomes "Surendar", and "naa chaavu nen chastha" turns into "my die is my die". There are fart jokes and pee jokes, but also surprisingly deep metaphors, including one about the dire state of female representation in Telugu cinema. There are delightfully layered scenes where some characters are in the depths of frustration while others are in the midst of a joke.

From a technical standpoint, Keedaa Cola feels fresh. It has snappy jump-cuts, slick slow-mo shots, and glimpses into the nitty-gritty of mechanistic processes - like how that cockroach ends up on the assembly line, which is a direct nod to Ritchie's signature style. The pace scuttles forward with great haste at times, skimping on crucial details. At other times it crawls down to luxuriate in slow-motion shots of graphic or disgusting content. At some point, a guy's head exploded like an overripe watermelon - it is breathtaking. Yet, well-crafted as it is, is still reminiscent of Hollywood fare.

Back in 2016, when Tharun made his debut with Pellichoopulu, he started a new wave in Telugu cinema. One in which filmmakers ditched the over-the-top star-studded extravaganzas in favour of authentic stories and relatable conversations. Then came his second flick, the easy-breezy buddy-comedy Ee Nagaraniki Emaindhi, and that's when he really became a darling of the young, urban crowd who yearned for something hip and cool in Telugu cinema.

In Keeda Cola, Tharun takes his aesthetics to new heights, and once again pushes Telugu cinema into uncharted, even if imitative, territory. With an ensemble cast, parallel storylines, and novel cinematography, Keeda Cola is unlike any other Telugu movie ever made. Bhascker's irreverence for conventions shows. Yet, at the same time, it gets too caught up in its own coolness and edginess in a way that makes it disjointed and confusing.

Keedaa Cola never quite finds its rhythm as a whole as it struggles to harmonize its diverse characters. Naidu's gang - played by a very magnetic Tharun Bhascker, an in-form Jeevan, and rising star Vishnu Oi - is in a league of its own, perfectly in sync, and uproariously funny. Whereas veteran comedian Brahmanandam and Chaitanya who plays his grandson are quite literally on a slower track. Then, there is Raghu Ram, who plays a mercenary with his signature "Roadies" intensity and irritation brought to the screen, and is yet again on a different wavelength. When all this motley crew converges on a certain bridge for a crucial showdown, the result is more cacophony than symphony.

Instead of letting the edits and the performances dictate the rhythm of the screenplay, Vivek Sagar's background score gets liberally slapped onto scenes. His tracks, on their own, are sensational and unique-sounding, but through overuse they drown out the dialogs in several instances.

A caper like Keeda Cola calls for perfect timing in every scene, absolute precision in its edits, and performances that harmonize like a well-tuned orchestra. When these are found lacking, as they are in some scenes, the whole movie becomes out-of-step, uneven and, despite its commendable efforts, somewhat mediocre.