24 Kisses movie review: Mindless and Meandering

What follows is, true to its title, endless kissing, going through a breakup, and the couple knows how or where to reach one another when they’re repeatedly separated.
24 Kisses movie review: Mindless and Meandering

Movie: 24 Kisses
Cast: Adith Arun, Hebah Patel, Rao Ramesh
Direction: Ayodhya Kumar Krishnamsetty
Rating: 1/5

For each one of us who’s enthusiastic to watch avant-garde, sensible and engaging entertainer from Ayodhya Kumar Krishnamsetty, his latest film, 24 Kisses will prove to be a major disappointment. It’s an unfortunate mess of a story about an acclaimed children-centric filmmaker who spends more time caressing his student and aspiring filmmaker’s every curve.

The film opens with a young filmmaker, Anand Kumar (Adith Arun) showing up at a psychiatrist, Murthy (Rao Ramesh) receiving talk-therapy for his rocky relationship with another ambitious filmmaker, Sri Lakshmi (Hebah Patel). The proceedings take off interestingly with Anand narrating his version of what transpired in his life when he met Sri, even as Murthy gives him relationship advice.

What follows is, true to its title, endless kissing, going through a breakup, and the couple knows how or where to reach one another when they’re repeatedly separated. What’s more annoying is like how we try to protect our computers with a 30-day trial version of an anti-virus software, the lead pair strike a 30-day relationship challenge to help strengthen the relationship. While the anti-virus quarantines the infected and malicious files on your computer’s hard disk, the director hardly knows what to do with his lead characters.

The narrative suffers from pretentious touches like a clumsy, yet confused character of the protagonist, who wants to be in a live-in relationship with no strings attached. Here, the director weaves a sickeningly sentimental flashback track accentuating Anand’s need to make films on children and his disbelief in the sanctity of marriage. (For a moment, I wonder the modicum of purpose in my life.)

The director crammed its simple story with too many subplots and distractions that water down the central drama at its core. None of the emotions in the film ever seems to touch us and the chemistry of the lead pair just come across as fake and lustful. The dialogues in this film are inconsistent, and the supposedly meaningful scenes sound inane and pradoxically make you laugh out loud. Honestly, I have double checked to be convinced that Ayodhya Kumar, who won a National-Award for his debut directorial, Minugurulu has helmed this creatively bankrupt and entirely mindless film.Joi Barua’s music and background score pass muster. Adith Arun brings an iota of credibility to his part, while Rao Ramesh, Hebah Patel, VK Naresh and Aditi Myakal fail to rise above its inert script.24 Kisses is one of those rare films that gets absolutely nothing right. What starts off interestingly, ends in a mess. Without any thought, this is a terribly awful film of the year.

— Murali Krishna CH
muralikrishna.db@
newindianexpress
@onlymurali

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