The emotional quotient of They Call Him OG falls flat, the plotting looks jerky, and the runtime feels compromised, but hey, if you are a Pawan Kalyan fan, none of this matters, notes Arjun Menon.
The Pawan Kalyan starrer They Call Him OG has been in the making for a long time.
After many script changes, schedule breaks, and a mammoth two-year production prompted by the leading man’s busy political career, Sujeeth’s action epic is finally here.
They Call Him OG kicks off in Japan, where the yakuza and samurai clans are fighting for survival.
There is energy in these scenes that sets up the one missing samurai, who dodges the yakuza, and makes his way to India with an immigrant who has made a fortune in Japan in the hope of starting a new life in Mumbai.
An Indian boy of half-Japanese descent, being the sole surviving member of a clandestine samurai secret society, is the kind of absurd imagination I crave in my blockbuster cinema.
They Call Him OG tells a story as old as time but the writing in the first half frames Pawan Kalyan as a structural absence, around whose aura the film’s mythology is built.
Pawan Kalyan has rarely been celebrated with such indulgence that the act of criticism itself becomes a laborious slog and buzzkill.
We get all the standard strands of similar narrative: An estranged adopted son, warring crime families led by patriarchs sidelined by their cocky children, sea ports standing in for wretched business empires, a cargo shipment carrying RDX, and a family member out to wreak revenge on Ojas Ghambheera for a crime committed years ago.
These are the various strands of ideas transposed on top of a done-to-death template action outing.
The film is a loving tribute to Pawan Kalyan.
Sujeeth, in his haste to celebrate his idol, co-opts the bland reel-like structure of social media fan tribute videos.
They Call Him OG does not cohere as a movie and is just a slowed-down, martial arts-coded riff on Ajith Kumar’s Good Bad Ugly, which was a similar product of love from its maker Adhik Ravichandran towards his screen icon.
Sujeeth is interested in the action more than Adhik and has far more creative set pieces assigned to his idol. But the blatant tribute-like clinginess to Pawan Kalyan’s magnetic screen presence alone fetches diminishing returns with repetition.
In the very first fight scene, where we are introduced to young Ojas Ghambeera, a trim Pawan Kalyan, wielding a katana, walking to rescue his father figure from his captives, is shot with expressionistic minimalism.
Sujeeth shows restraint in how he captured the initial design of the action with Pawan Kalyan framed as a living silhouette, without revealing his face.
Shadows and blood oozing out of the edges of the katana sword are images captured poetically with a sense of mounting suspense as you wait to see the face reveal.
But as the sequence stretches out, the filmmaker’s love for the star overstays its welcome, and the action becomes an indulgence.
The slashing and cutting up of bodies is over the top and gruesome, but never sadistic.
The performances are one note across the board, with Sudev Nair and Emraan Hashmi having some sort of personality in a world where Pawan Kalyan is the only person who matters.
Arjun Das is miscast.
They Call Him OG is in a hurry to skim over its emotional touchpoints and jump back into the action, which have been the north star of Sujeeth’s tired screenplay.
Thaman is the backbone of this film. He understands the fan assignment and complements Sujeeth’s scattershot vision.
His musical score is the missing emotional tissue that binds the film’s core themes with the sophistication that the writing lacks.
Thaman’s score is sensitive to the evolving ludicrousness of the material, and energises certain sequences.
The episodic structure doesn’t do the film any favours as the sporadic moments of euphoria don’t land as expected.
Ravi K Chandran and Manoj Paramahamsa capture the anime-coded visual grammar, where the colours pop and Pawan Kalyan is lit like a God walking on earth. They match the time jumps and episodic jerks in the screenplay, maintaining a uniform look for the film.
Sujeeth is ambitious and is trying to integrate a cinematic universe with a direct allusion to his previous film, Saaho, where two actors from that film also make a cameo.
This is not the Lokesh Kanagaraj school of superstar filmmaking, but a more stylised version where action bridges the gap between the sketchy character work and weak plotting.
The emotional quotient falls flat, the plotting looks jerky, and the runtime feels compromised, but hey, if you are a Pawan Kalyan fan, none of this matters.
Just sit back and let the charm of Ojas Gambeera overpower you into submission.
They Call Him OG Review Rediff Rating:
