Srisailam Review

In a jail somewhere, Srisailam (Srihari) is getting tortured by the police, who are expressing their disgust at a heinous crime committed on some Amarnath pilgrims. Srisailam roars and massacres his way out of the jail. Cut to the snowy hills beyond the north-west corner of India, where some terrorists, Ashfaq Khan (Yashpal Sharma) and his cohorts, are throwing their hands up in the air and uttering the word 'jihad' every 5 seconds. After listening to Srisailam's animal cries against Hindustan, Khan almost French-kisses him in ecstasy. Maybe he really did. Or maybe it was just the snow melting on his lips. Wet lips can be so misleading.

Anyway, he assigns Srisailam the job of killing an ex-army officer, Krishnadevaraya (Krishnam Raju), who's preparing for peace talks between India and Pakistan. Srisailam now takes up a job as a bus driver at the college where Krishnadevaraya is the Vice-Chancellor.

Krishnadevaraya wants his son (Ram Kiran), a student in this college, to become an excellent fighter. Not to use his skills to fight the terrorists, however, but just to win a boxing tournament. Terrorists have to be fought with more ruthless methods, like having multiple screenings of Srisailam.

Anyway, after watching Srisailam's displays of personality, they realize he is the person to get trained under. For all those worried about this since Srisailam is actually a terrorist, a narco-analysis test which reveals his identity and purpose comes as a breather. It takes us to a flashback in which Major Srisailam sadly pieces together the parts of the dismembered body of his reporting officer, Vishwa (Naga Babu), during an outing with the jihadis. Vishwa's happy family was earlier burnt in the Lumbini Park blasts, and Srisailam has sworn revenge.

After the narco tests, Srisailam starts speaking strongly about the usage of sleeping pills. Now, we are ready to French-kiss him in ecstasy, but we quickly realize it's just his screwed English - he is actually referring to sleeper cells, and says that we have to clean up the Old City of anti-national elements working through "sleeping pills".

For this, he enlists the help of the youth of the city, who climb every tree and go to every nook and corner of every lane to find those making weapons to kill large numbers of people at once, but have limited success - as in, they find plenty of people making bombs and RDX, but not the makers of Srisailam.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani terrorists have come to know of his double-crossing. So Khan leads Srisailam into getting the police to wrongly arrest innocent young men from the Old City, using a CD with records of hundreds of students. Moreover, Khan also disguises himself as a policeman and shoots them all down. This makes matters very serious. Fortunately, people are already leaving the theatre, so it's allright to slip in any crap at this point and wrap it all up.

Srihari and Krishnam Raju put in good performances, but they can't save gibberish of this magnitude. Half the women in this movie are intolerable, and the other half make them look tolerable. There's a comedy track with Venu Madhav and Brahmanandam, which is funny only because it's them doing it. To describe the college sequences, we'd need to be more polite than is legally allowed. The songs are half-decent, but you just wish they weren't so painfully choreographed.

Srihari's presence doesn't make this a less apologetic way to spend almost 3 hours. Take the hint and stay away from terrorism. Of all kinds.