Ghaati dosen’t understand how to harness Anushka Shetty’s electrifying screen presence, complains Arjun Menon.
These days, each Anushka Shetty release feels like an event.
The actress, who takes long gaps between her projects, enjoys a peculiar market in Telugu cinema, especially in her action avatars.
She gives her all in Ghaati, but is let down by a bland script.
Ghaati is caught between familiar impulses and uninspired writing choices.
The reunion between Anushka and her Vedam director Kris Jagarlamundi is an underwhelmingly told story that is brimming with dated tropes and lacklustre ideas.
The actress in one of her recent interviews spoke about her ‘trust and confidence’ in Jagarlamundi in giving her strong characters, like Saroja from Vedam. It is precisely at this basic function that the film squanders away with its conventionality.
Ghaati, set around the Eastern Ghats, tells the story of drug peddlers and the local drug mafia.
Two delivery personnel, Sheelavathi (Anushka Shetty) and Desi Raju (Vikram Prabhu), decide to split from the gang and form their own business by approaching the higher-ups directly.
But their boss Kaastala Naidu (Ravindra Vijay) is not happy with this arrangement and retaliates.
The film deals with Sheelvathi’s resistance against Naidu’s gang and her one-woman fight for revenge against the bad guys.
The setting itself gives away the conventional plotting and stereotypical world on offer.
Anushka rises above the weak writing with her screen presence. You can see her lending credibility to the predicament of the leading lady pushed to the brink and forced to fend for herself against men who wield more power.
Anushka is perfect for this kind of demanding action roles, where the physicality and gravitas in pulling off exhaustive set pieces can make up for wayward film-making.
There are no clear stakes, and you can only root so much for a stone-faced Anushka.
But there is no clear trajectory in the way the screenplay charts the upward resistance of the woman, who is forced to prove her mettle and survive from the most bizarre, violent attempts at her life.
Ghaati is paced almost like a straight line with almost no excitement in its world-building.
An impressive opening montage sets up the world of the marijuana distribution network, from the rural areas to the city, a business being run over many years.
But the film does not use the details of this particular setting, ripe with possibilities, for mining the socio-political landscape where the story unfolds.
Every action beat, line of dialogue, and revelation is made with bland affectations of bygone action cinema with the ‘stoic hero’ archetype, here replaced by a female warrior.
The location is a character in the story, but the film-making fails to register the rough, sprawling landscapes as anything but open spaces against which the action unfolds.
Anushka is at the top of her game, effortlessly owning the genre with plenty of charm and sleight of hand to pull off the relentlessly set-up action scenes.
She makes up for the void in the conception of these sequences, but there is only so much that a star can do to punch up a confused script.
Nagavelli Vidya Sagar’s loud score does not help the melodramatic sensibility at play.
Manojh Reddy Katasani’s frames capture the rustic beauty of the Ghats and the expansive setting, but the visual grammar is also impacted by repetitions and clumsy action choreography.
Ghaati is a confused film that does not understand how to harness Anushka Shetty’s electrifying screen presence.
Texture is forsaken for generic saleability, and conviction is compromised at the altar of aimless action.
The film is held together by Anushka and offers momentary glimpses of what could have been if the makers had stuck to the authenticity of their ideas without giving in to commercial compromises.
Ghaati Review Rediff Rating:
