Organic Mama Hybrid Alludu Movie Review: This romantic drama is outdated and insipid

In one of the early scenes of Organic Mama Hybrid Alludu (OMHA), we see Mirnalini Ravi's character fall in love with Vijay (Sohel) at the first sight, with no foreshadowing or underlying emotion to explain why.

We see her gaze on this man while he is conning a group of white tourists into buying his family's handicraft Kondapalli dolls. A couple of minutes later, a set of goons catcall her and her friends, only to be saved by the hero. We immediately cut to a song set in Ramoji Film City, and lo and behold, these two people are in love forever.

Cast - Sohel, Mirnalini Ravi, Meena, Rajendra Prasad, Ajay Ghosh, Varun Sandesh

Director - SV Krishna Reddy

Overall, OMHA stands as an outcome of an uninventive plotline and prosaic narrative. For the most part, the film stands on a redundant-retro story from the canon of masala movies. A rich girl falls in love with a poor boy. The rich girl's dad does not approve of the alliance and then... You guessed it right. The poor boy proves himself, and subsequently, the rich girl's dad stands corrected. Then, the rich girl and poor boy have a happily-ever-after story.

However, one unpredictability is the sheer lack of conflict throughout the film, despite the multiple opportunities presented by its skeletal storyline. For instance, there is a series of events in the second half of OMHA where the hero and his friends elaborately lure an evil real estate builder into buying government land. And in the climax, the builder is invited to the wedding of the central characters. And exactly, when you expect a showdown or a climactic punch, you receive hardly any payoffs.

OMHA’s laggard pacing is much like that of a TV soap, which works against the film leading to a patience-testing experience.

 The film continues its siege of incessant boredom when, in addition to the substandard screenplay, you have to endure the lengthy dialogues, weary expositions, jejune platitudes and not-so-funny humour. And when all fails, OMHA resorts to loud, suggestive music to sledgehammer the story into its audience.

Hollywood-based actor-showrunner Mindy Kaling once wrote in her memoir Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me, "I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world." And I would be inclined to extend that otherworldly analogy to Masala cinema as well. Verisimilitude, in this part of the world, is not synonymous with successful cinema. That said, there is a marked difference between employing suspension of disbelief for a well-packaged script with strong mythological underpinnings and being asked to do the same for a film that has conflated a series of narrative lacunae for a screenplay. And, in the case of OMHA, it could have found even the slightest of redemption if only it had an innovative and engaging screenplay and technical finesse... if only.