Soggaadu Review

Ravi (Tarun) is an ambitious 20-year-old youngster striving to fulfill his Dad's vision - that he clear Standard X. His attempts to do this see him being chased by angry mobs, bashed up by cops, and mentioned by name in the President's Republic Day speech on the challenges of the 21st century.

One day he is rescuing a woman who is getting married against her wishes, since you cannot rescue a woman who is getting married according to her wishes and still stay grammatically right. In the process he is spotted by Swati (Aarti Agarwal), who is totally impressed by his machismo, his presence of mind, his loyalty to his friends and his capability to stay trim even in his early 20s. She starts giving him interested glances, allowing for a 25% margin of error in expression.

Ravi doesn't understand mathematics, and so he completely flips for her. Besides, true love is much harder to find than a VLCC franchise. The film drags through the next half hour thinking it's being funny, and making you wish you'd brought your WinZip CD along.

Anyway, what happens is that Ravi tracks Swati down, only to realize something about her that makes courting her a task fraught with enormous risk - something that can put him, his friends, his family and everyone else interacting with her in very grave danger. Her dialogue delivery! He also realizes that she is the sister of the city's worst goon (Subbaraju), who can kill people just for looking at her, and says it clearly in all his ads.

Ravi decides that the best way to handle a dangerous killer is to kidnap his sister, and so whisks Swati off. Now Swati tells him the bad news and the good news. The bad news is that she is actually in love with someone else, and used Ravi's help to escape from her brother. The good news is that she had exactly 30 seconds of dialogue in the first half, and she's just used it up.

Ravi decides that love is about giving and not taking, that the meaning to life is being selfless, and that between Swati and him, it's better if he sacrifices his love, since otherwise she'll have to utter all these heavy-duty dialogues. And so he dedicates himself to saving her from her brother's goons, uniting her with Chandu and ensuring the film ends.

Trying to make a classy romance with Aarti Agarwal in the lead appears like an immediate compromise, since there can't be any chemistry between the lead actors or great characterization of the lead lady's role given her huge limitations in dialogue-delivery. Indeed, the film has less than 5 minutes of her talking, since our directors know all this.

The film has some sepia and tint visuals in junkyards that make it kind of visually appealing in parts, but there is nothing much to hold your attention either in the script or in the performances or in the dialogues. There is a weak parallel comedy track involving Brahmanandam that gets tiring very fast, and one involving Ali that's yucky. Tarun is okay, and the music is average.

Just about average fare.