Officer (Telugu) Review

Picture this. A bunch of male cops and one female cop (Myra Sareen) sit down to drink together, and one of the men says to the woman something along the lines of, "I'm single because having met a woman like you, I decided to never see other women." Then the woman's all, "So you go for men now? I didn't think you were like that." And then they all laugh. It's such an awkwardly bigoted dad joke that you realise that RGV is old, and Nagarjuna is old, and so is everybody in this movie that's not Myra Sareen and Baby Kaavya who plays Nagarjuna's daughter.

This wasn't the only inane thought to flit thorough this writer's mind trying to survive long stretches of cringe peppered with intermittent triggers of sharp headaches, the latter generally occurring when somebody gets shot in the head. Was it funny when we explained our joke? We have no way of knowing. Officer seems to have broken something in our brain that helps us identify wit of any kind.

We've seen some genuine pinnacles of bad cinema here at fullhyd.com, some so bad they came out the other end to become brilliant. We doubt, however, that there was ever another film less in need of making.

Officer has Nagarjuna playing a cop called Shiva (colour us surprised), who's out to get another, highly decorated, cop called Passary for what is said to be corruption but what turns out to be a whole lot of psychopathic bloodshed and mayhem and lots of cliché villainy. Shiva and Passary have an oddly homoerotic relationship full of long looks and lingering glances. There's a bit towards the end of the first half where they get into each others faces and there's a caressing handshake that just has to be a booty or we'll eat our boots.

Ostensibly, Officer is the story of the ultimate good cop who is a True Believer in the System, vs the ultimate bad cop whose hubris turns into a monomaniacal belief the he is the System. In reality, it's a movie so derivative, we could've been watching one of those video mashups on YouTube. On that note: Hey, Mr. Verma! The '90s called! They want their shitty plot devices back!

Myra Sareen is basically there to, in actual words, say that she, as the token woman, is in fact intelligent. She says it over and over and over again. Baby Kaavya is so creepy. Most people who had a kid who talked like that would probably set it on fire, because it's obviously haunted. Nagarjuna is intense and smiles creepily and looks like that creepy uncle everyone asks you to stay away from, which makes sense because all the male characters are written and directed by RGV and he's the ultimate creepy uncle. Everybody is very obvious and very boring because RGV obviously wrote out a plot and decided that any and all exposition would be done via people reading it out loud.

The film looks really dated, and there's too many crotch shots and too many close-ups of the pores in people's faces and their nostrils. The fight scenes are nonsensical and jarring, and far too slow-paced to be shocking if it weren't for how ear-piercingly loud they are. The music just is.

That's actually the least negative thing to be said about the entire film, too - that it exists. RGV obviously ran out of stories to tell sometime in the '90s, and now spends mysteriously-gotten time and money sort to cutting them up, juggling them together, picking up a few pieces and calling them cinema. He also somehow manages to talk big names to go along with him in his quest to fool you into thinking it is legit. Watch literally anything else.