Monday, June 27, 2011

Rangam - Tamil Movie

Watched 'Rangam', A Tamil movie dubbed into Telugu with Jiiva as the lead yesterday at Prasad's. I heard nice reviews about this movie and when a good friend of mine came by to Hyderabad, we planned to catch up over the movie. I think its a total paisa-vasool movie.

The movie gets off to an action packed start with a bank robbery. A newspaper photographer Ashwathama (a very lively and likeable Jiiva) sees the bank robbers getting away and follows them on his bike and takes some pictures while doing some amazing bike stunts. Great stuff, the stunts. He sends the pictures to the police who identify most of the robbers save a couple. At work Jiiva meets a new colleague, an ace reported from Vizag, Karthika (forget her name in the movie) and falls for her. There is another journo, Saroja (don't know her real name but she fits the part), who is in love with Ashwath.

Karthika soon finds a story on a villainous politician (Kota Sreenivasa Rao). He is planning to get married to a thirteen year old girl to get his stars working favorably for him. When Kota shows up at their office the next day, Kartika finds her recorder missing. No evidence! She is about to get fired when Jiiva risks his life and gets pictures of the wedding when it is taking place. Kota goes to jail and everyone is happy. Unfortunately its election time and Kota, an aspirant loses out.

Meanwhile a young idealist student leader Vasant starts a youth party and tries to contest the elections honestly. He has no chance as the ruling party (Prakash Raj as CM) buys votes through cash, liquor and other bribes. However Ashwath who is covering the elections gets good stories of how this young student and his team is doing good work like saving people from fires, treating the ill etc which get printed. The youth brigade starts getting better response from the electorate and when there is a massive meeting, it all comes crashing down with a bomb under the stage. Ashwath is the one who saves Vasant from getting blown up because he gets a message from Saroja that there is a bomb under the stage and he rescues the young leader just in time. But several people die, including Saroja. I kind of predicted her death anyway. She looked dispensable.

With the attack, the youth party wins the elections. However one fine day Ashwath finds that the bank robber (who is also a terrorist with socialist ideas) was present at the meeting, choking Saroja to death with his feet. When Ashwath meets Vasant at the CMs office, the same guy (with an unmistakable id on his face in the form of a scar) is there but he escapes. Ashwath has questions, how did Saroja know about the bomb, who killed her, why is this chap with Vasant? Meanwhile the other love interest Karthika who is not turning any great stories so far finds out that Vasant and Ashwath have a back story. They were college friends. Ashwath explains that he wanted to cover and promote his idealistic friends in their political foray without mucking up the professional ethics of a journo. What ethics?

Anyway the rest of the movie moves into action packed mode as we try to unravel some of these questions. There are twists and turns, lots of fighting and action and it all ends well finally. I loved the action scenes, the exotic locales where they shot the songs and the lead pair looks like they are dancing within a few inches of their death, the twists and turns. Total time pass. Maybe the last fight could have been cut by a few minutes but there is another twist right in the end so its okay. Of course there are things that you would question and ask to be cleaned up, some loose ends here and there, but who cares. We are not looking at a classic here and it was not meant to be one either - as an entertainer it gets full marks.

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