Raa Raa review: Too many cooks spoil this broth...
Tollywood’s tryst with horror films will never wane. It’s the most favoured genre for our filmmakers as we get a toast of an experimental subject every now-and-then. And the latest entrant in the horror-comedy bandwagon is actor Srikanth’s Raa Raa.
The film has been in the news for all wrong reasons as its director’s name was missing from the posters following a rift with its producer Vijay.
Eventually, an established director on the condition of anonymity and other enthusiastic technicians from the team had taken over the mantle to complete it. Cut to the story, like how several directors try to make their own path that leads them to success, the film’s protagonist Raj Kiran (Srikanth), a struggling director chooses to showcase horror to the audience with his film. He sets the ball rolling with his ‘creative’ team comprising a 60-year-old co-director, a wannabe globetrotter, an entertainment junkie and an ambitious woman and lands up in an abandoned bungalow.
As the proverb goes ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’, it appears like every person who has donned the director’s hat has worked on the same dish. The film is nothing short of a non-digestible meal where ingredients fight with one another and nobody cares for the blokes who should have it. The recipe is uncooked and distasteful that you would be surprised to see an array of characters and scenes that make it completely incoherent.
The makers of Raa Raa arrived with a ready-to-use plot that lacks verve. Well, it might be a new idea during its inception, but with the delay in production and due to other compelling reasons, the core plot bears similarities with Taapsee-starrer Anando Brahma. But, they tossed it up with vulgar and double entendre dialogues which come out straight from veterans like Srikanth and Raghu Babu, who tries to keep it going throughout the film.
The poorly etched characters slacken the film’s pace and the melodramatic narrative uses regular cinematic cliches like a romantic song, a jump scare and a buffoonery scene. When you are watching a horror film, it’s not the story the viewer looks forward to, but the proceedings. The saddest part is almost every filmmaker/film charts a similar storyline unless it’s something really fascinating like Prema Katha Chitram, the genre-bender.Raa Raa runs you over and makes you feel restless without doing anything exciting. Overall, it’s an incredibly awry story that fails to engage its viewers on any level.
muralikrishna.db @newindianexpress@onlymurali