Veera Review

See, here is the thing: a half-decent film must necessarily consist of scenes that either make you care about it, or make some godforsaken sense. Veera, well-rounded in its lousiness, does neither. And yet, it audaciously traipses on, firm in its faith that this is the blockbuster you've been waiting for all summer.

It all starts when the son of Shaam (Shaam), a kickass cop, has been just kidnapped and killed. Shaam doesn't intend to tell his wife and parents that his kid has just died till he kills the killer, by the way (because the family would be heartbroken - duh!). This hush-up is conveniently taken care of as the boy is supposed to be in residential school and needs to be in touch only once a week.

When Shaam is being clobbered by the goons, a random fighter pops into the scene and announces that he's the guy appointed to protect Shaam and his family. Just like any senior police officer whose family member has been recently murdered would do, Shaam doesn't check his new recruit's credentials until the interval, by which time Deva has entered Shaam's home and the hearts of everyone in it.

As it turns out, Deva is not the real Deva. Deva (the fake one) has a past, in which he is actually Veera. Veera is the son of a popular Sadashivapuram MLA. In this past, he also has a wife (Kajal) who won't let him sleep with her (to be precise, as the movies describe it, she isn't allowing the "first night" to be conducted) until he romances her properly.

And in the meantime, in the present, Pradeep Rawat prowls around in a saffron robe, hunting for Shaam's wife Satya (Sridevi). After everything in the story is laid bare, after every cliché has been run through, after every lame dialogue has been uttered, you realize that sense had left the building ages ago.

Most probably, so did the writers. And a lot else. Veera is a movie no one seems to have cared about while filming. The makers evidently wanted to make a "typical Telugu film", and thus made Veera nothing more than a convenient collage of villains, fights and songs.

The plot looks like one huge, extended typo. Characters meaninglessly walk in and out. For example, how is Dharmavarapu even connected to the story?

Plus, there are so many villains that you lose track of who wants what. The fights are gory as well - and in a silly way, with limbs and heads being chopped (and gleefully copy-pasted elsewhere on the screen). And pointing out logical flaws in Veera is like counting the number of holes in a... ermm ...hole.

Ravi Teja seems uninterested. He and Brahmanandam struggle to create comedy in a few scenes, but the battle was lost on the writing board. As for Divya Vani, who brings back memories of the villain's wife in Panchakshari with her spectacular make-up and acting, well, we feel sorry. Roja has a dignified presence.

Kajal is pleasant, but is given near-obscene lines and a vulgar romantic track. Shaam has very (yes, very) bad lip sync. Taapsee is in this just for the songs - she's obviously being used to recreate the "glamorous" '90s heroine, complete with pout, skimpy clothes and suggestive body language.

Thaman was evidently told to dish out a bunch of "mass" tunes, and he comes up with music that is the acoustic equivalent of a bloodbath. Which actually sits pretty with the rest of the film.