There’s a special place in cinema purgatory for films that are not made by a person’s vision, but just pushed out by committee. Hari Hara Veera Mallu is precisely that film. It begins as a period action caper, sets itself up like a heroic quest, takes a detour into devotional theatre, falls face first into a political pamphlet, and then staggers along hoping we wouldn’t notice it has no plot. But you do notice. You notice everything. Especially when your lead changes his beard style five times in the flow of the story, with barely any rules or explanation.

At almost 170 minutes, Hari Hara Veera Mallu doesn’t just test your patience, it slowly chloroforms it. The film squeezes your patience out ounce by ounce, until you give up and practice the beauty of sitting still. One moment you’re watching a high-stakes diamond heist, the next you’re in a Windows XP-era background CG jungle, and then suddenly, there’s Bobby Deol with an awkward voice, straight out of a poorly made TV serial.

Directors: Jyothi Krisna, Krish Jagarlamudi

Cast: Pawan Kalyan, Nidhhi Agerwal, Bobby Deol, Nasser, Sathyaraj

Veera Mallu (Pawan Kalyan) is a swash-buckling thief who is famous for his bravado. Owing to his reputation, a king (Sachin Khedekar) appoints him to steal a set of diamonds and in process, he falls for Panchami (Nidhhi Agerwal). But then the mission fails for a surprising reason and he is again appointed by another king, Quli Qutb Shah, to steal the Kohinoor, because his reputation is still strong, and to their surprise, he can also tame a CG tiger. Then he ventures on a road trip on a CG horse with a team to enter Delhi and steal the diamond. However, a few more daring stunts and fan service later, the people around him confront him asking, who he really is and why he is so special. (How dare they missed that it is Pawan Kalyan)

The first half of the film is coherent and fairly engaging. It has a beginning, some intent, and even a few moments of genuine flair, likely the handiwork of director Krish Jagarlamudi, before he disappeared into the fog of "left the project due to personal reasons". The action choreography clicks, the drama is occasionally effective, and Kalyan reminds you he still has that charm to light up the screen. But then comes the second half. And with it, the great collapse.

Veera Mallu isn’t just a hero now. He’s an avatar with the backstory of a mythic demigod born with a purpose and trained in a secret Gurukul. And funnily, when this is revealed, it isn't like you are seeing anything that hasn't been seen in a Pawan Kalyan film. He is not who he says he is. He has a deeper mission. He saved many people in the past and will save more. We have seen him take up subjects like these, especially since the actor turned into a politician.

But nothing convinces you that this film has a story to tell at its heart. Or if it does, the film doesn’t know how to tell it. For all its political references and righteous monologues, HHVM is as hollow as the dummy sword they used. It flirts with the aesthetics of revolution, but all it really wants is applause and deliver some fan service. There’s barely anything meaningful happening here except for a couple of scenes of cultural diversity that Veera Mallu exhibits when he saves people. 

And what of Pawan Kalyan himself? He appears good, bad and silly in the same film. The inconsistency in his look only makes it all clearer, it’s a film cobbled together across years, across schedules, across moods. Sometimes he’s lean and sharp; sometimes he’s visibly heavier and distracted. In one scene, you’d swear he’s a revolutionary. In the next, he looks like a man who walked in mid-take and just went along with it. I always used to wonder, how come an actor looks the same throughout a film? I am glad that, accidentally, somebody corrected it for me, though in a terrible way. 

And then there’s the dubbing, or shall we say, the voice experiment. It’s a surreal experience to hear Bobby Deol, Sathyaraj and a few others all speaking in the exact same voice. It’s like hearing a dubbing artist dry-run his dialogues for all the actors. Pawan Kalyan’s own voice is so dull and flat in the mix that you wonder if someone placed a blanket over the mic. Or maybe it’s metaphorical, the sound of a hero being silenced by the weight of his own legend. Nidhhi Agerwal is, interestingly, offered a character with layers but then the performance never arrives. The layers are all in the costume design. You keep waiting for her to react, to feel, to emote but she’s too busy being in the film.

Technically, the film is an oscillating mess. Few sequences look solid and make an impression and a few others just dry out interest. MM Keeravani, the only real star here, provides a thundering score that tries desperately to hold the film together, and almost succeeds. If you had doubts about his work in non-Rajamouli films, this will be your answer. KL Praveen’s editing in some fight scenes is sharp. Thota Tharani's sets are impressive. And the VFX... why flog an already dead CG horse? But the question arises, for the price of this ticket and talks of the budget, if this is the visual grandeur that makers thought would suffice, then what was the “high-budget” all about.

Coming to the fight choreography by Pawan Kalyan in the climax, which was much hyped, you seriously don’t grasp anything happening on screen. You see many shades of Johnny, Gudumba Shankar, Sardar Gabbar Singh and Bheemla Nayak. It’s evident that Kalyan is obsessed with that Kurosawa-esque hero-rising-from-defeat moment. He tries to bring that in many of his films, but the problem is that it has never been executed skillfully with Kalyan. You know that if the same climax fight was handed over to a master director like Rajamouli, he would, in meme terms, simply cook. But here, it’s chaotic, uneventful, and mainly, too long and patience testing.

Hari Hara Veera Mallu is not a terrible film, That would be too easy. It is something worse: a dull film with no spirit, even if the title argues otherwise. There are a few charms, some ideas, some shots, some sparks, and definitely an interesting setup. But the film quickly goes off-track, and becomes a lazy fight against oppression of those times. Also, forget historical accuracy, there’s barely any entertainment in the film. When a star like Kalyan stands tall, this is not the product you expect. At best, this film will be laughed at or worse, will live a long life on internet meme memory.