Kick Review

Kalyan (Ravi Teja) is the kind of guy who likes to do things he gets a kick out of, even if it means putting others' lives in peril, or not staying employed for more than 4 days. No girl would want her younger sister to go around with a man like that. But when the girl is Ileana, no man would even care whether she has a sister. So when Naina (Ileana) stomps into his life asking him to keep off her sis, but he brazenly makes his love known to her, even though when with him she keeps behaving like she's stepped on a dung-pile the size of Australia.

One day, Naina has a chat with his father (Sayaji Shinde), who is very supportive of Kalyan's way of life. Apparently Shinde, despite being a successful bank manager, missed out on the "doing his own thing" schtick, which he now doesn't want his son to miss out on, too.

Naina now reciprocates to Kalyan, but what's a farcical relationship without an even more farcical break-up? Our lovebirds split over the fact that Kalyan doesn't think much of 'jobs', 'salary' etc., and once even lies to the lady about his work. This half of the film is peppered with a comedy track involving Brahmanandam's penchant for pinching women's bottoms, as well as his frequent attacks of Jayaprakash Reddy's private parts. Some movies will do anything to bag an A-rating.

The present is much saner. Or so the second half starts off saying. Now in Malaysia, Naina is on the way to getting engaged to a well-dressed, polished police officer Kalyan Krishna (Shyam) whose pet peeve is a slippery masked robber back in India, who he's never even caught sight of, let alone nab. This crook has been burgling the homes of rich politicians, industrialists etc., and creating mayhem in the police department.

As you can guess within 2 seconds of seeing the mask, that eel is none other than Kalyan. And that's what Krishna's in Malaysia for, he tells her. The rest of the story details how Kalyan successfully pulls off a couple of heists he planned, and also why he's doing all this.

Kick deserves a pat on its back for not being a regular mass movie ridden with spite and gore. But Ravi Teja's comic timing is disappointingly underutilized in this one. The result is a lot of forced humour - for example, in the whole sequence in which Kalyan convinces everyone he has amnesia. The romance must be the worst hit - it is contrived, in the first place, and it isn't even taken to its logical ending.

Then, the bit about why Kalyan resorts to robbing could have actually won hearts, but it seems like a plot-section that the makers struggled to force-fit into the story.

Ravi Teja's unabated energy carries the film through even the stillest of moments. Ileana's smoking enough to distract anyone from the story as long as she's there, and she does a great job acting, too. Pity the story forgets about her after a point. Maybe because she refused to mouth swear words after a point.

Shyam is refreshing to watch, but is given some horrendous lip-sync - which language was he delivering his lines in? The rest of the cast includes Kota Srinivasa Rao, Brahmanandam and Jayaprakash Reddy, who are their usual talented selves.

The songs are quite off-beat, and hummable, too. Smoothly choreographed songs are a plus point of the first half. And the rest of the visuals are glossy.

Ravi Teja has been more fun before, and will be later. And Kick surely could have been more fun. Don't ask a lot of questions while you watch this one, or you'll miss whatever fun there is in it.