OG movie review:
Once upon a time, there was a poster, a font, a vibe, a teaser, everything except a movie. Years from now, that is perhaps what They Call Him OG will be remembered for. The anticipation was its own pop-cultural event. Sujeeth, the director who once drowned Prabhas in Saaho, was now supposed to give Pawan Kalyan the Lokesh Kanagaraj treatment. Every teaser, every song, every poster was received as gospel by Telugu cinema’s faithful. For a while, we almost believed. And then came the film, less thunder, more balloon-ish. Urgh!
Director: Sujeeth
Cast: Pawan Kalyan, Priyanka Arul Mohan, Prakash Raj, Arjun Das, Sriya Reddy
On paper itself, the film sounds stuffed. Ojas Gambheera (Pawan Kalyan), trained in Japan under a Samurai master, finds himself drawn back to Bombay after years in exile. Sathya Dada (Prakash Raj) is the father figure, the ports are the empire, and a mysterious container becomes the MacGuffin everyone is chasing. What’s inside the container? Who cares. We’ve been here before. It’s the same, expired “estranged son returns to save the dynasty” story, reheated for the 1000th time for us Telugu audiences. Replace the setting, change the costume, throw-in a Katana, remove the axe, get the guns, shuffle the villains, and voila, a 'vibe gangster' film!
Sujeeth’s screenplay writing, ahh that’s a topic to discuss. He has an uncanny gift. Give him a straight road and he’ll design a confusing, zig-zag flyover with three unnecessary tollgates. He weaponises flashbacks, voice-overs, non-linear edits, and somehow, still manages to say nothing. All that narrative origami could have been forgiven if the film winked at us, admitted its own pulpiness, and played to the gallery. Instead, it takes itself very seriously. And that’s what makes OG a big disappointment. Who needed a typical Telugu cinema family drama, Sujeeth?
And so, every big moment in OG has the special tendency of progressive emotional disconnection. The more things go wrong, the more we feel nothing about them. Gambheera loses a family member? So what. Gambheera takes out a cartoonishly hyped villain? So what. The only thing that sparks is a stray police station sequence where Kalyan cuts loose. That ten minutes feels like what the whole film should’ve been — unhinged, stylish, and bloody fun. Wasn’t that promised and promoted too?
The larger issue is, however, not Sujeeth’s screenplay, but Gambheera himself. Flat, bloodless, and oddly lifeless. Pawan Kalyan brings a few fleeting quirks in the way he cocks a gun, shouts his name mid-fight like Tony Montana, and tosses out a Haiku at the sneering but futile Omi Bhau. You glimpse at the possibility of a delightful, eccentric gangster persona. But those moments never add up. He spends the rest of the film looking like he wandered out of Trivikram’s Agnyaathavaasi onto an 80s gangster set with bell-bottoms and all. A hero in a film like this needs a pulse, a presence, a little danger. The world around him hypes him to the sky but then, the man himself is just a mannequin, this time with a Katana. Heroic gangster roles need personality, not just cool costumes.
This has been Pawan Kalyan’s long, uneven romance with action films. His persona, martial artist, Japanese cinema enthusiast, philosopher-politician, always promises more than the films deliver. His fans know this ritual well. Hype... Expectation... Disappointment... Repeat. OG doesn’t break the cycle, it cements it.
The rest of the cast floats around like garnishing in an over-dressed salad. Priyanka Arul Mohan, the porcelain wife trope. Sriya Reddy and Arjun Das, wasted. Emraan Hashmi, dubbed to death by Hemachandra. Even Prakash Raj and the milieu behind Gambheera are barely there. None of them get meat. Because the film itself doesn’t know what dish it’s cooking. Is it Kill Bill-esque genre mishmash? Is it a Godfather? Is it a family drama? Is it a Japanese samurai tribute? What arrives is something that looks slick from afar, but is dead on touch.
Technically, the film is just as inconsistent. The costumes, the sets, the Samurai props, the stylised guns and gangland backdrops, all of it doesn’t gel well together. They’re like decorations created for a Japanese-Telugu carnival, glossy for a moment before a little wind blows them all away.
Thaman, bless him, is the lone man fighting for a cause. His score is the only place where East meets West, where samurai edges blend with rock riffs, where mass energy breathes. He gives the film life, and the film returns the favour by ignoring him. His music tries to lift the film, but there’s nothing for it to land on. It is like a ornate Katana that nobody wields.
And that’s the story of OG. A giant balloon inflated for three years finally escaping the hype factory, not with a bang, but with a slow, embarrassingly long sigh. A spectacle that kept promising blood and thunder, but leaves you in the theatre like Gambheera himself, lips twitching, staring into the void waiting for that Firestorm that is never arriving!