Samrajyam Review

Samrajyam has a sad ending - you have to wake up from a solid sleep and leave the theatre. But like we at fullhyd.com always say, waking up at the end of a movie is better than not waking up at all at the end of a movie. However royally you want to be treated in a movie theatre, you do not want to be carried out on a stretcher. And Samrajyam comes close. When we tried to wake up the guy sitting next to us as we got up to leave, he rapidly flailed his arms screaming something unintelligible, then turned upside down, and started breathing only every alternate time. This is when we at fullhyd.com leave, and we did.

Samrajyam is the story of how one man's repentance for his ghastly deeds inspires his villianous brother, saves two innocent families, and destroys an entire audience. The movie starts off promisingly - it has a censor certificate and all. However, it fails to sustain that tempo. The beginning has some random guy Shiva (Vikramaditya) stopping a marriage and scaring a lot of goons by showing a time bomb strapped under his shirt. Pooja (Nisha Kothari) is impressed since she knows she cannot do this - she doesn't have a shirt on at all. She's wearing the least clothes anyone's ever worn to a marriage - a cutoff Jeans and a bustier.

She falls in love with Shiva, and starts wooing him by calling him to random places and not turning up. Fortunately Shiva's standards are low - it's enough if you tell him what place to come to, you don't have to turn up yourself. So when Pooja tells him to come to her village Jammalamadugu in Rayalaseema and talk to her factionist murderous father Rudra (Suman), he promptly complies.

On the train he meets Sardar (Srihari), who's just coming back from prison after serving a 14-year sentence for murder. You know because he tells you. He tells this to anyone who wants to know, many who do not, and all those among the rest who have a ration card, a driving license or at least a sun sign. And all this with oodles of self-pity. Now don't get us wrong - we at fullhyd.com have nothing against people who've served a 14-year sentence for murder. In fact, some of our closest friends are people who've served a 14-year sentence for murder. It's just that some onscreen characters who start every sentence with a deep sigh make us want to do something that is punishable by a 14-year sentence for murder.

Anyway, Sardar is Rudra's younger brother, and there's a flashback and all involving something you thought went out of fashion with Balakrishna's last hit. There are 2 powerful families fighting each other for generations in the village, but increasingly the younger ones want peace. To expedite the process, one day Sardar goes and butchers the entire rival family to death. Unfortunately he leaves the women alive, and one of them has grown up to take revenge, even if she has to shed her last vestiges of clothing.

Samrajyam is a disaster from the word go. If you can follow what is happening most of the time in the first half, it should be a matter of concern, since that means you are on the same wavelength as the director of this one. Malavika is shoehorned in for one song, Nisha Kothari is prancing around in minimal clothing in railway stations and traditional marriages, you don't know just how she is related to the story, the completely self-assured Vikramaditya seems to be running after her instead of telling her to buzz off after her crank calls and no-shows when he hasn't even seen her in the first place...

And the second half seems to have an existence of its own with Vikramaditya, Samiksha and the romance almost completely disappearing, and obsolete Seema violence taking centrestage. There's too much gore, and it is left to Srihari to lend some dignity to a disastrously unimaginative storyline. Nisha Kothari's ridiculously frugal clothing strips her character, key to the film, of any seriousness whatsoever, and compounds the error of judgement in casting her for that role in the first place.

Watching Samrajyam is like experiencing a bad omen - even if nothing happens for several days after that, you'll still be living in dread. Skip this one, and skip it sooner than later.