Maska Review

When Krish (Ram) is still a kid grappling with his studies, his parents never imagine that one day he will reach dizzying levels of academic and professional success, and then give it all up to cleanse society of the scourge of corrupt politicians, stand like a pillar by meek and oppressed people, and earn the love and respect of people thrice his age. And it's a good thing they ever imagine any of that since none of it happens. Krish just turns out to be a good-for-nothing lout whose marks look like a printing mistake, who's passed just one subject in his entire undergraduate course, and who can't get any job that pays more than Rs. 5,000 a month ...and many that pay less than that.

Concerned about this, Krish decides that the sensible way to get out of the rut that he's in would be to take small steps one by one. As the first step, he decides to get into a cushy top-management job in the US. To overcome the minor problem of getting a visa to go there first, he smartly plans that he'll marry a dumb girl who's gotten a visa anyway.

Since there are no websites listing dumb Indian girls with a US visa, he tries his hand at a random chick Manju (Sheela) who he spots outside the US Consulate. Luckily, she's as dumb as he could have hoped for, as she shows by falling for his super-corny approach in record time. However, just as he is about to propose to her, he sees an incredible sight - no, not the director of this one worried about logic, but the gorgeous Meenakshi (Hansika) sitting right next to him in a local train.

She hugs him to say thanks, he goes to her office to return it to her, she invites him to have coffee with her, and she forgets her important file in the train. Okay, those four things happen in a different order, but Krish cannot keep track of anything after he's met her. Unlike you, he doesn't even go back to the sentence to order it properly, and decides that that means he's in love. Since he didn't actually propose to Manju, and since he feels that giving up true love for ethics isn't ethical, he decides to dump her and concentrate on courting Meenakshi.

In between all this, there are factionists Shinde (Pradeep Rawat) and Simhachalam (Mukesh Rishi) trying to kill each other to become a cabinet minister. Why do they want to be a cabinet minster? Are Manju and Meenakshi the same person? What is in the file that Meenakshi forgot? Are all these important enough questions to be put in this paragraph? To find out the answer, you'll have to watch the movie yourself.

For audiences increasingly used to Srinu Vaitla's brand of comic genius and Trivikram's / Puri Jagan's standard of dialogues, Maska has nothing much to offer. Nothing in the movie appears remotely possible, the comedy is mostly loud, and B Gopal appears to suffer from the Narasimha Naidu / Indra hangover 6 years later. You don't make scrawny Ram the hero of a tale featuring factionist violence, and the violence is anyway over the top. Plus, who wants to watch factionist tales now anyway?

B Gopal is a throwback to the Big Hero Big Bloodshed days of Tollywood, and everyone left in Tollywood now (with the exception of Venkatesh) is more campus crowd material - no Telugu film with blood and gore has been a hit in 2 years, Desamuduru being the last. The screenplay of this one is credited to M S Raju, and reflects that - there's none of the freshness of most contemporary Tollywood fare, the romance part is completely convoluted, and the tale consists of a flaccid-looking teenager actually beating up armies of machete-wielding thugs spilling out of Sumos, rather than outwitting them with ingenuity.

Ram is his usual expressive self, but Hansika stands out more for lousy lip sync than for acting bones. Sheela sheds more clothes than you'd think necessary for what is mostly a teen romance, but does a neat job. All others are seasoned Tollywood veterans, with Jhansi deserving mention for her Nellore dialect. A couple of songs, including the 2 title songs (and what's the title got to do with the movie, anyway?), are vibrant stuff from Chakri.

Maska is perhaps worth a watch if you've seen everything else in town, but that would still be an unfortunate excuse.