Arjun S/O Vyjayanthi Movie Review: All fire, not enough flavour

There is something oddly charming about a film trying hard to be unabashedly entertaining and not dumb. Arjun S/O Vyjayanthi, directed by Pradeep Chilukuri, is exactly that. It wears its heart on its sleeve, takes big emotional swings, and even dares to end on a brave note. And yet, you walk out with a polite nod rather than pumping fists. The storytelling style is familiar but the film keeps it in check.

Director: Praddeep Chilukuri

Cast: Kalyan Ram Nandamuri, Saiee Manjrekar, Vijayashanthi, Sohail Khan, Srikanth Meka

This is a mother-son conflict film straight out of the Telugu commercial cinema cookbook. Vyjayanthi (Vijayashanthi) is an upright cop who worships the rulebook; Arjun (Kalyan Ram), her son, takes the opposite route, the criminal saviour way, to serve justice in his own muddy way. Familiar, yes. Predictable, sure. However, what’s surprising is how much the film tries to push within this limited setup. The screenplay is consistently engaging. There is barely a dull moment, every scene nudges the plot forward, almost as if the writers were paranoid about the audience getting distracted. And to their credit, they do manage to pack in enough masala without letting the gravy spill. Even the minor details pop with imagination. 

Take the introduction scene of Sohail Khan, he is thrown inside an empty well, full of enemies. And there’s an impressively executed blood-bath sequence. The film right away shows what the villain is capable of without too much build-up. And then, Kalyan Ram’s introduction has many smart touches too. After the obligatory brawl, he casually asks the henchman for a cup of tea. The man, still trembling, rushes to a nearby stall. The vendor, with a knowing smirk, hands him six glasses and says, “By the time you get there, pour them all into one, it’ll be just one tea.” Sure enough, the man’s shaking hands spill most of it, leaving behind a single serving. It’s a clever gag, a blink-and-miss touch that reflects the film’s efforts to infuse imagination into its masala machinery. All these tiny touches put a smile on your face. The writers clearly wanted to push the envelope of a commercial entertainer. And that’s impressive because mainstream action entertainers have become stale enough that even such small flourishes make a scene stand out.

The climax is a gutsy narrative beat, the kind you don’t expect in a film like this. It is bold and lands the emotional kick far better than the violins that try to underline it. If only the music understood what the writing was going for. Composer Ajaneesh Loknath seems to have borrowed his sound palette from a dusty template marked “mass film 2004.” Blaring horns for the hero, screechy snares for the villain, and some tragic strings for the mother-son sentiment. It’s all there, just not alive. The film's biggest letdown, though, is its presentation. The visuals are aggressively uninspired. The typical warm Telugu commercial colour grading that makes everything look turmeric, flat camerawork that doesn’t dare to try anything remotely new, and action sequences that seem more rehearsed than executed.

Kalyan Ram, to his credit, deserves appreciation for that bold climax. He doesn’t exactly reinvent the archetype, but he clearly knew what would work for this film. Unfortunately, his character isn’t written as a person but as a function, a son who is devoted. There’s no inner world to him, no crack in the facade. Vijayashanthi still performs her stunts with a flair. It’s so commendable for a film like this to feature an action-heavy female character. But her character is equally one-note. For someone so emotionally central to the story, she reacts like someone reading an FIR. Even in the climactic emotional reconciliation, her face stays stoic. There is barely any real, human mother-son connection here. This has been the problem with most of Telugu cinema’s emotional action films — there is emotion but it’s not human. One of the strangest decisions in the writing is how the central misunderstanding drags on forever. After a life-altering rift between mother and son, the film flashes forward with a montage song where the son keeps bringing birthday cakes for the mother and isn’t allowed to step inside her house. Four or five cakes later, the mother gets to know what happened on that tragic day. In that time, not once do these two, both operating within the same city, clear the air. It’s only when the local slum population gives her a PowerPoint summary of Arjun’s sacrifice that Vyjayanthi reconsiders. Really? A massive attack takes place, and even then an ex-police officer wouldn’t know what happened for four years.

There are quite a few spaghetti western touches across the film. What Arjun S/O Vyjayanthi needed was a bit more confidence to let go of the formula. It flirts with that edge but never fully embraces it. Had there been a sense of swag and some playing around, this film would have knocked everybody’s minds. Instead, we get a film that delivers in parts, falters in execution, and settles for adequacy. That said, it’s an interesting commercial outing. There is a punch, yes. Just not enough spark to set off fireworks.