The Raja Saab is a poorly-judged effort to appease to the lowest hanging fruit, and is not sincere in its ambition to entertain, notes Arjun Menon.
The Raja Saab is a debacle of epic proportions.
Like most Prabhas starrers these days, the team behind The Raja Saab has left no stone unturned in cramming in all the money spent on screen, but none of that counts as the writing is brazenly unfocused.
The Raja Saab is a lazy, dated CGI fest that mistakes stale tropes and broad execution for scope and imaginative storytelling.
The film begins of framing its story around the ageing Gangamma (Zarina Wahab), who suffers from Alzheimer’s.
She lives with her grandson Raja Saab (Prabhas), who is the remnant of a disastrous chapter in her past life.
Gangamma can only seem to remember one thing from her long, tragic past: Her husband Kanakaraju (Sanjay Dutt).
One day, the long estranged grandfather resurfaces in their life by chance, leaving Raja Saab on a quest to track down the old man who left his wife years ago.
The Raja Saab is not a serious enough film to be taken literally as a romp for Prabhas to hang his growing superstardom on. It’s a lesser work that barely works as a breather in between the back-to-back action films in his filmography.
On paper, the decision to become a part of a horror comedy sounds enticing and Prabhas clearly seems to be having fun with his leading ladies (Malavika Mohanan, Riddhi Kumar and Nidhhi Agerwal), and pulling funny faces.
But the film is too overwrought with weightless ideas and silly jokes to make any sense as a coherent cinematic experience.
The Raja Saab is a rehash of older filmic tropes and ineffective slimy jokes that would have worked if done 20 years ago.
The three-way love triangle or featuring a fidgetty hero making his way through namesake women in his life is the most tiresome part of this fantasy adventure.
Prabhas is forced to flirt with the three female leads and it’s upsetting to see a film of this magnitude dedicate so much time to trivial courting humour.
The first half of The Raja Saab is a train wreck in slow motion, where you get introduced to the three female leads who are not given any identity or utility in the screenplay.
It’s not even a sexist divergence as their roles are too trivial to be taken into any sort of serious critical discussion.
It’s like Director Maruthi flashbacked to the late 1990s or 2000s where such screenwriting shorthands were more in vogue.
The central idea of a grandson using his unrelenting love for his grandmother to get out of a labyrinth alternate reality meshed together by his evil, deceased grandfather is interesting enough as a throwaway pitch, but that one line is stretched beyond all human capabilities here.
There is a criminal oversight in the writing that is barely legitimate to register the stakes of all the silly shenanigans indulged by the ensemble supporting cast.
The glossy textures are not limited to the writing, but also extends to the broad, almost campy performances.
The film is hiding behind the non-existent emotional core of the grandson going to war for his grandmother as means to justify the CGI overkill, but it rarely connects beyond the superficial attempts at mixing scale with some earnestness.
Prabhas is fine as the perpetually-confused prankster caught between duty and fantasy. The film asks him to do the bare minimum and flex his humourous side.
The actor is clearly having fun being clueless and slightly irreverent. Still, he is the only redeeming aspect of this ‘entertainer’ that falls flat on its face.
Zarina Wahab is stately and imparts some royalty to a part that could have easily been done by a lesser-known actor. She assets her presence towards the finale and gets the next best thing to a well-rounded author-backed role in this film.
Sanjay Dutt is menacing in parts, a feature of his physicality more than anything else.
Thaman is adept at making the most laborious movie-watching experiences worth it with his plumbing scores.
The rest of the supporting cast does not stand out as they are barely given anything to do.
The CGI imagery and digitally rendered parts of the climax stand out and the time and money spent clearly shows.
But the action set pieces are too flashy and arrive too late to make any real impact.
The Raja Saab is a poorly-judged effort to appease to the lowest hanging fruit, and is not sincere in its ambition to entertain.
Raja Saab Review Rediff Rating:
