Mazaka Review

If a young man falls in love with a young girl, woos her, and beats up the college goon to protect her - that's classic Tollywood romance. What about when an older man falls in love with an older woman, and aggressively blushes every time he talks to her? That's some classic Tollywood family comedy.

In Trinadha Rao Nakkina's Mazaka, Rao Ramesh and Sundeep Kishan play a father-son duo living hilariously parallel lives. Tired of their bachelor existence, both men set out to bring a woman into the household to make a "complete family". Krishna (Sundeep Kishan) flirts with Meera (Ritu Varma), while his widowed father Ramana (Rao Ramesh) falls for Yashodha (Anshu Ambani), pursuing her with the clumsy enthusiasm of a teenage boy.

Their mirrored love lives are the film's biggest comedic engine. Both chase their respective women - yes, including the obligatory slow-motion run behind a moving bus. In one screwball sequence, father and son write love letters to their ladies, only for the letters to predictably get switched, leading to classic mix-up mayhem.

The film's charm rests heavily on the upended father-son dynamic - sometimes rivals, sometimes partners-in-crime. Sundeep Kishan, after a tedious detour into action films like Michael, returns to his forte of comedy, standing his ground in scenes with a veteran like Rao Ramesh. Ramesh himself brings his absolute A-game comic timing. Picture him flirting awkwardly, nervously biting his nails, and stealing shy glances - all while maintaining the self-aware glint of a master performer.

But the overextended gag of watching Rao Ramesh play a lovesick man wears thin after a while, especially as the narrative gets stuck in a rut. Signs of a chaotic production are visible. Scenes cut off abruptly, tone shifts without warning, and story logic taking a backseat. Songs pop up seemingly because they were filmed, and not because the story needs them.

Adding to the contrivances, Murali Sharma hams it up as a comically vengeful CEO, while Ajay plays a cop listening to the father-son duo narrate their misadventures. These four actors - Rao Ramesh, Sundeep Kishan, Murali Sharma and Ajay - get to claim the film's best scenes, and the women are left in the shadows as they devour the spotlight - to the film's clear detriment. Despite the narrative orbiting around Meera and Yashodha, they remain frustratingly underdeveloped characters.

Yashodha is played by one-time leading lady Anshu Ambani of Manmadhudu fame. While Rao Ramesh and she share an improbable chemistry, she plays her character with too much self-seriousness; and mouthing her dialogues in Hindi. Ritu Varma, too, plays it too straight and down the middle for her character to be anything but a marginal figure. With a lightly sexist narrative that treats these women alternately as lampposts and objects of desire, the women have little chance to shine in their own right.

Mazaka presents Rao Ramesh in the unlikeliest of avatars - a lovestruck Romeo - and that alone might be reason enough to watch it. However, it's far from a groundbreaking comedy. Just last year, Sri Vishnu and Naresh's Samajavaragamana mined the father-son dynamic for laughs, and much like that film, Mazaka repeats its tricks a bit too often, until it loses its juice.