Raja Babu Review

It’s always hard to maintain a second setup. Especially if it is not even yours. Rajababu is the story of a man who has to pay the price for his dad’s youthful peccadillo, by caring for the latter’s second family too after he dies. Like a farmer born without any moles, he finds that he simply cannot handle it. And if you paused to think about that analogy, you’ve already put in more intellectual effort than was spent on the plot for this one.

Rajababu (Rajasekhar) is a loan recovery officer for a bank who goes around bashing up people just because they are trying to kill helpless young girls. At least that’s the way his father Dasarathayya (Vijay Kumar) sees it – he wants Rajababu to mind his own business, and keeps giving him senti speeches. So Rajababu launches a beta version of his new improved self, and even gets married to Shanti (Sridevika).

But fate will not let him be, and he gets into jail again for getting into a fight with someone bullying his brother over gambling money. He decides not to tell the truth to his dad so his brother doesn’t get into trouble. In the interim, there are 3 songs, and a sequence where his wife gets pregnant (by him only). Basically, nothing happens in the first half of this movie, and so you can always watch the first half of another movie and come here for the second half.

Now Rajababu’s dad suffers a stroke, and unlike all other dads who give advice to their sons when dying, he gives him an address, telling him to take good care of the family staying there since they are his second setup.

Rajababu is shattered, since that is the most appropriate thing to do at that time. Then he hunts for the address, taking extra care to land up at the right house, since it can lead to disastrous consequences if you landed up at a wrong house and asked the housewife there if she is your dad’s second wife.

The other family is in deep trouble since a goon (Riaz Khan) is terrorizing them to pay up the mortgage on their house. Rajababu pays up the due, gets the elder daughter married, funds the second daughter’s education, and in the process incurs a debt which looks like the GDP of Switzerland. He has to mortgage his own house for that, and when his mom and wife find out, all hell breaks lose.

Rajababu is simply not a film for these times. It’s not a bad film as such – it’s just that it would’ve worked maybe 20 years back. It’s made on a shoestring budget, and suffers from a lousy script – all of the second half, you see the hero getting himself into conniptions over problems that seem to have such easy resolutions.

Rajasekhar needs to think up dramatically different roles to resurrect his career, not act in shoddier and shoddier films. Nobody else has any role of substance in the film. The parallel comic track, which takes up about 50% of the film, is a complete spoof – the 21,985th one – of Chandramukhi and Aparichitudu, and you laugh, on rare occasions, more because it is faces like Brahmanandam, Dharmavarapu and Krishna Bhagawan there than because the scenes themselves are funny. When you copy an idea after so many people before you have done it, it’s sheer creative bankruptcy.

Avoid this one at all costs.