Student No 1 Review

Student No. 1 ends with Kota's leg being trapped in the door of a collapsed car, and Brahmanandam and Ali debating on whether the best way to get it out would be sawing the leg off the car or the car off the leg. Most of the crowd thinks that this is just a joke and politely laughs, but we are the indomitable reviewers whose only fear is that our profession will fall on our heads, and make valiant attempts to detect profound messages. So here's the moral of the story:

1. Movies are like cars. When they crash, several innocent people can get hurt along with the driver. Ouch!
2. Movies are like legs. They're nice when they work, but if they're getting dragged then it's not too much fun.
3. Movies are like saws. Even when they rub you the wrong way, it is you who has to suffer the pain.

There, that's the weekly dose of learning for you. But you have probably wandered in here also wondering what this film is about, so here goes.

Aditya (NTR Jr) is a student of the RNR Law College, a brilliant figment of someone's imagination. The college has an awful reputation, and yet attracts the most curvaceous of women. The lecturers firmly share the students' belief that classes end after attendance, the library is also a disco (rather, just a disco), and the bully and his cronies beat up students 'discovered' studying.

Aditya is your run-of-the-mill Tollywood student - brilliant, eloquent, excellent at dancing and fighting, and complete with an out-of-the-earth flashback. He desperately wants to study, for some reason consistently undisclosed to us (what all things you have to justify these days), but the bullies won't let him. They even beat him up, but somehow he won't respond. Of course it isn't helplessness - what normal Tollywood student can't beat up a few dozen goons?

Add these to his lack of any tangible recognition of the romantic overtures of Anjali (Raji), his pretty classmate, and his stalling her advances with profound-sounding statements, and you realize that the scriptwriter is trying to make you eagerly look forward to some flashback. Whether you oblige or not depends purely on how sympathetic you are to people who try hard.

The flashback hits you anyway, with Aditya narrating his traumatic experiments with his dharma to an entire college after a superman scene. They are all in tears, and you are in suspended motion. The rest of the film could have been an experience in and out of personal trauma for you, but a very unusual man salvages it - Kota. Kota is brilliant in this otherwise less than mediocre drama, and shows some of the genius of his Satruvu and Gaayam essays.

Student No. 1 could have been a good movie with a better script, better lead actors, better music, better comedy and better ticket prices. NTR Junior fails to give any distinctive personality to the character he enacts, and is poor at dialogue delivery. He simply doesn't have any flair for comedy. And some scenes comparing him to his grandfather are just cheap tricks to arouse some ill-befitting nostalgia - grandfather was nothing like this at any stage of his career. Like demonstrated earlier, Junior is surprisingly good at the dance and stunt sequences, though, for a man his size - he's grossly overweight.

Raji is just about okay, and has nothing to do apart from falling in love with her man and staying that way. The comedy is poor, especially that involving Brahmanandam and Ali. Kota is the saving grace of a movie that lacks in nearly every department of filmmaking, starting right from the script.

The artificialness of the script stands out - no dad would treat his distraught son the way Aditya's does, no person would do to another what the father of the girl Aditya saves does to him, and few college bullies would be as immature as the one Aditya keeps fooling. And things like Aditya being struck by misfortune just because his sister doesn't cross his path on the fateful day just make you want to say, Mr. Rao, please make films for audiences of this era! Yes, this is a film from K Raghavendra Rao.