Mama Manchu Alludu Kanchu Review

One of our colleagues began his review of Soukhyam with this:


What is it but coincidence that yours truly watches a movie the very next day and realizes that truer words were never spoken? Mama Manchu Alludu Kanchu is perfunctory in every sense of the word, and then some, and then some more.

Picture this scene - the heroine Sruti (Poorva aka Shamna Kasim) finds out that the guy she's in love with, Balraju (Naresh), had faked everything, from his name to his profession to his status to his parents. She finds this out when she goes to his room and sees him drinking and dancing with the man and woman he introduced to her as his dad and mom. She berates him, and he tells her that everything else might be false but the fact about him loving her is true. The friends plead with her to accept his love, and she relents in exactly 30 seconds and proceeds to a massy duet.

Scene 2 - Two women, Kantham (Meena) and Priyamvada (Ramyakrishna), find out that they're married to the same man, Bhaktavatsalam Naidu (Mohan Babu), for the last 25 years, and that he's been cheating them in the name of business trips. They berate him and Balraju immediately gives him a sob story about how Naidu was forced to marry both of them and how he's been going through living hell for the last 25 years. He pleads with them to accept him, and they relent in exactly 30 seconds and proceed to get a family picture clicked.

Those two scenes must be enough for you to glean the depth this movie has in terms of script and storytelling. MMAK's script must also be pretty clear by this time - Naidu has two wives and both of them have no clue about it. His daughter falls in love with a wastrel and Naidu's opposed to the match, but the wastrel finds out about the wives and puts Naidu in a spot. How this tangle is resolved forms the rest of the movie.

From the perfunctory script to the perfunctory performances, MMAK is a terrible film. The humor is forced, the songs are terrible, the situations are beyond contrived, and the characters are dumber than dumb and dumber put together. Sreenivass Redde, the director, is clearly clueless. And the background music for this movie is so outdated, dinosaurs would recognize it.

Mohan Babu's children must have an axe to grind against him - why else would they make such a movie starring a man who has a stellar body of films to his name? Mohan Babu's performance in the film appears like he's mocking his own previous roles. The remaining actors seem to think they are in a Doordarshan serial in the '80s - and the levels of overacting are to be seen to be believed.

MMAK is a movie that would've flopped whether it were made in the '90s or the '80s or the '70s or any other decade. Stay far, far away - we recommend different galaxies altogether.