Let’s talk violence. Not the kind you scroll past on your phone while chewing dinner, but the blood-slicked, bullet-pierced, hammer-swinging carnival that passes off as violence in much of Telugu (and Indian) films today. The kind that promises to blow your brains out but barely tickles your spine. The kind that screams high but whispers hollow. It’s time we cracked open the prosthetic skull of this trend and sniffed what’s rotting inside because there’s something deeper happening here.
Foundations of Telugu cinema's action
Telugu cinema, for all its many virtues and stunning sins, was never built on gore. It was built on emotion wrapped in drama, set to thumping songs, and served with a spoonful of masala. The action? Sure, it was over the top. Cars flying, men slashing, and villains dying in a snap. But the blood? It was theatrical at best, cartoonish at worst. It wasn’t about brutality. It was about heightened reality. Drama first, punches second.
Enter today’s cinema, or what feels like a Frankenstein attempt at making violence "more brutal.” It’s not just action anymore. It’s bioengineered action. We’ve moved away SS Rajamouli’s sensible “Upma and Jeedipappu theory,” where Jeedipappu (cashews) were those action high points and Upma was the emotional story base, to films that are nothing but an overdose of cashews with zero Upma. Try eating that for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Lazy bloodbath, emotionless carnage
Nani’s HIT 3 is a prime example of this phenomenon. A film that promised investigative thrill, brutal action, and psychological grit. What we got? An expired firecracker pretending to be a bloody bomb. Nani walks through blood like he’s in a detergent ad (I was desperately waiting for a Tide packet to suddenly show up and wipe Nani’s white suit ), and not a single ounce of emotional core sticks. You don’t remember HIT 3’s action because it wasn’t born of necessity. It was simply there. Because apparently, a hero with long hair and beard and a few litres of synthetic blood is all it takes to make action now.
Let’s go one step further and throw in Sandeep Vanga’s Animal, that testosterone opera of a film. Much was made of the violence. The kulhadi, the designer machine gun, the beefy Kurta lungi sports-shoe wearing Ranbir Kapoor chewing criminals in that long action interval. But look closely, we didn’t feel real violence in the bone-breaking. It was in the drama. Ranbir soft-threatening his family members while carrying his urine bag had more dramatic voltage than that impactless KGF-imitating machine gun scene. That’s the dirty little secret everybody is thinking about but nobody wants to admit: violence in Telugu (and Indian) films is no longer about meaning. It’s about aesthetic. It’s not felt anymore, it’s just flaunted.
Even Lokesh Kanagaraj, the supposed messiah of stylised, swagger-filled violence, stumbled in Leo. It was marketed as a violent actioner. What we got was lukewarm chai. No emotional anchor, no connective tissue. Just Vijay in auto mode, trying to convince us he’s got demons inside him. Compare that to Kaithi, where even though the action was brutal, it meant something. Dilli wasn’t fighting for the glory of giving us a high. He was fighting for his daughter, a classic Rajamouli Upma foundation.
Filmmakers' conundrum: Audiences are seeing worse
But let’s also understand the conundrum makers are facing today. Filmmakers are now playing tug-of-war with a dopamine-dead audience. They are waking up to headlines of death, gore, chaos, sex, and swipe through war clips before breakfast. In this climate, how then can a few kicks and gunshots on screen possibly stir them? Your slow-mo shot of a machete gliding through four ribs isn’t shocking, it’s (yawn) Tuesday (Looking at you, Boyapati Srinu’s action). That’s the enigma filmmakers have today: How do you make a fully-fed audience hungry again?
And many makers are responding by adding more chillies when the real problem is that there’s no salt. Go back to drama. Go back to making us feel something before making us see something.
When violence works: Kill, Kaithi
Violence, when done right, is catharsis. But where are those lovely Tarantino-esque bloodbaths that dance with funk, Takeshi’s shocking and dark humour violence or Park Chan-wook’s tiresome and twisted ultra-violence? It’s Kill, the rare recent gem that understood this. A film that doesn’t just wear its brutality like an accessory but earns it. The stabs, the swings, come from a place of urgency. Because it’s built on solid stakes, real emotion, a superb villain and a world that feels like it could snap suddenly in half. That’s how violence should feel: like it could spill into your seat. Kaithi did it spectacularly well, too. Salaar’s loudness worked to an extent because the conflict was calling us in, two best friends becoming enemies, and that’s the story people turned up to watch. It was over-the-top, sure, but Prashanth Neel does it all with a sense of detachment and celebration. When you watch his KGF, you know it’s all flashy and superficial, but you went to watch because he tickles your senses. Madness is enjoyed when it has a purpose or a method.
Word for filmmakers: Violence isn't the problem, lazy depiction is
There’s a lesson here, one that filmmakers desperately need to tattoo on their storyboards: Violence is sexy only when it has a soul. Otherwise, it’s just noise. If you want your bloodshed to land, lace it with longing, regret, pain, and not just factory prosthetics and growling heroes in slow-mo. We’re not asking for realism. We’re asking for relevance. Give us madmen with a cause, not these gym bodies with long beards who are making their body doubles do a lousy daredevil stunt.
Because the truth is…we all love a good fight. We grew up on Chiranjeevi breaking bones in rhythm and Rajinikanth turning villains into chutney with a graceful smile. I don’t want to romanticise the past but even from a decade ago, a memorable fight always had some kind of thought-out juicy drama. A family member’s crisis, a mother’s tear, a best friend’s ghost, something, anything.
So yes, go ahead, make violent films. But let there be a reason. Make them hurt. Because in an age where social media shows people war and chaos before lunch, cinema must fight harder, not just with blood, but with purpose.
Word for audiences: Our real crisis
Finally, the real stinging truth is that onscreen violence today isn’t just a symptom of changing tastes or dopamine-chasing audiences. It’s a reflection of a culture that has grown terrified of confronting real emotion. We’re scared of grief, intimacy, silence, so we hide behind noise and content. Filmmakers, reflecting on this, no longer want to move us, they just want to shock us. Because shock doesn’t demand vulnerability. It doesn’t demand craft. You just need a VFX studio and some slow-mo. But here’s the thing, violence without vulnerability is cowardice in costume. It’s the bravado of a culture that’s numbed itself to feeling.
And when cinema stops feeling, like truly feeling, it stops mattering. So no, the crisis isn’t just that the action is soulless. The crisis is also that we, as audiences, are scared of soul. And a film industry afraid of soul will always reach for the hammer when a whisper would do.