At a time our ‘mass’ heroes are going over the top displaying their machoism, Chiranjeevi gamely takes on a role with more comedy than action. The film is about an estranged couple, but the story is so not the point. There’s a lot of inspired nonsense. That’s what matters. That’s the short take. A longer review follows, and it may contain spoilers.
This is how Mega Star Chiranjeevi – who plays Prasad – is introduced in Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu. He is on the terrace of his apartment complex, taking down clothes off a clothesline. He then goes to another clothesline and accuses a neighbour-lady of stealing two of his clips. At other times, he is addicted to a mega-serial that seems to be made out of episodes from his own life. If you look at the plot of Anil Ravipudi’s film, it’s really about Prasad being a kickass security officer who smokes stylishly and wears Prada sunglasses and knows how to single-handedly take down an army of masked villains. But Anil knows that that is a boring action movie that we have seen a thousand times. He knows that that is not the movie we want for Sankranthi. So he wisely concentrates on Prasad wearing very middle-class T-shirts and very middle-class spectacles and being the centre of a family comedy.
At almost every point, there’s some inspired bit of nonsense – like the hero and heroine falling in love by using sign language, or marital truths being discussed using the example of egg whites and yolks, or a scene where poor Hareesh Peradi is attacked, or the wonderfully silly animated flashback that solves a big headache for Prasad. No one is taking any of this seriously, least of all the mega star. He even shares space with another big star, and these scenes (with partly Kannada dialogue) are a riot. Even the film’s biggest action set piece stops abruptly for a bit where the hero and villain take the name of Gandhi and sit down for peace talks. I was relieved because every young star, today, wants to become a Chiranjeevi or a Rajinikanth, and here’s Chiranjeevi playing “mass” at the lowest possible pitch. There is a throwback to a chartbuster song from Abhilasha, but it’s used in such a fun way that it doesn’t look like hero worship. Anil Ravipudi is the Rohit Shetty of family comedies. Gags are his equivalent of flying cars, and if one doesn’t land, the next one isn’t too far behind. And he may be one of the few directors who knows the value a star brings to a movie but also knows that that alone cannot carry the movie. This is as much an Anil Ravipudi film as it is a Chiranjeevi film.
The basic story is like the Ajith-starrer Viswasam, about an estranged couple. The man is middle-class. The woman is super-rich. He re-enters her life to protect her, and so forth. After a long time, we get to see Nayanthara in solid form. She looks fantastic as always, but she also nails the kind of acting this kind of film needs without overdoing it. Her part is shaded just enough to make us feel her ego without reducing her to a one-note family-wrecking woman-monster. The guest star is in great form, and Chiranjeevi is in top gear, playing a part that often reduces him to the object of a joke. He looks great, he still dances well, and the script supports him as both a star and as an actor. Is Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu a great movie? Perhaps not. It’s too long and a tad uneven. But I had a great time watching it in the theatre. And sometimes, that’s all you want.
