Prabhas has fun in a role that’s not serious. But the whole film should have been that way. Instead, things turn sentimental and tedious. That’s the short take. A longer review follows, and it may contain spoilers.
Well into the second half of this three-plus hour mix of horror and comedy and sentiment and romance, we get a song sequence. It’s a remix of the ‘Koi yahaan… naache naache’ chartbuster from Disco Dancer. Some of you in the audience may have some questions. For instance, why are we breaking into a song at this point in the narrative, especially when it looks like the kind of all-cast, celebratory number that typically appears during the end credits! Or you may wonder why they chose to remix this particular song, from over forty years ago. Is Bappi Lahiri having a resurgence that none of us knew about? But I had no such issues. They could have remixed ‘Pyar kiya to darna kya’ from Mughal-e-Azam and I still wouldn’t have had any issues. And that’s because nothing in The RajaSaab is supposed to make sense in the conventional way we define sense. The RajaSaab is the kind of movie where Malavika Mohanan walks into a haunted mansion empty-handed, and she never repeats an outfit in all her subsequent scenes Some of you in the audience may wonder if one of the ghosts in the mansion was doing double-duty as a tailor. But again, I had no issues. If anything, I wondered why she wasn’t changing outfits midway through the scenes. Imagine the impact if every line of dialogue had her in a different dress!
Our hero-worshipping mass movies aren’t really supposed to make much sense. And when you set the film in a supernatural universe, the lack of “logical” sense becomes a given, like the films Sundar C makes in Tamil or Anil Ravipudi makes in Telugu. Therefore, the question in The Rajasaab isn’t why three heroines are present in a movie that doesn’t need even one. The real question is why they didn’t cast all the young actresses in Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Oriya, Tulu, Marathi, Hindi, and Bengali cinema. At one point, a man tries on a lot of royal jewellery – on his head, neck, waist, and so on. The next minute the man vanishes but the jewellery remains where it was, in the space where his body was. It’s a visual effect that reminds you of a Prabhu Deva song sequence where the dancer vanishes but his hat and clothes stay in place. And sure enough, a bit from that ‘Muqabla’ song plays in the soundtrack. That is the self-aware tone of The RajaSaab, and against this backdrop, Prabhas is the most relaxed he has been in a while. Sometimes, mega-stars should be relieved from their usual duties of saving the world from mega-villains. Prabhas seems almost relieved that he just needs to crack jokes and act scared, at least until the mega-climax. Many of these jokes land, and they keep you grinning the kind of grin where you know you are having a decent-enough time but you don’t want to admit it to others.
The story has Prabhas playing a carefree villager named Raju. Zarina Wahab plays his grandmother. She has Alzheimer’s, and Raju thinks he can cure her and unite her with her long-estranged husband, played by Sanjay Dutt. But listen. This story so not the point. Because it doesn’t take off until the intermission. Until then, we have Raju falling in love with a nun played by Nidhhi Agerwal. Yeah, a real nun, like you’d find in a church. Or in an exotic foreign location. Because in just a bit, she has discarded her habit and is shaking her Christ-given hips with Raju in a dream duet. A little later, Malavika Mohanan turns up. Sadly, she’s not a nun. But (#dadjoke alert) she’s second to… none! (Nun… second to none… get it?) In a sweet move, director Maruthi hands over an entire action stretch to Malavika as the hero simply watches. Or maybe it is a calculated move. Maybe he is really saving his energy to fight the giant imaginary crocodile that lives in that haunted mansion. Meanwhile, Riddhi Kumar hangs around, doing what a third heroine does in such films, which is to mimic painted furniture.
The RajaSaab is nowhere near the good-silly movie it could have been, because – apparently – when a mega-star is involved you can’t just make a Naked Gun type of nonsensical series of gags. Imagine the possibilities in the scene where the nun sees a photo of Raju and is reminded of Jesus! But no! You have to get serious. You have to get sentimental. This is where things fall apart. And that ginormous running time doesn’t help. I loved the idea of hypnosis being used by the forces of both good and evil, but this remains just an idea. It isn’t developed interestingly, and after a point, it becomes tiring. Boman Irani plays a psychiatrist named Dr Padma Bhushan, and he made me wonder if he did his training under Dr Padma Vibhushan. In a touch that needed to be exploited more, the throne in the haunted mansion is designed like a rocking chair. And this, finally, made me ask myself a question. Was the king really old? Or did the carpenter make a mistake and switch designs, and did the grandfather in the adjacent home end up with a jewel-studded throne? The RajaSaab ends with the promise of a sequel, and (Vijay fans, please excuse me…) I am waiting! At least this one, I hope will be totally nuts and allow Prabhas to cut loose even more. A film with a flirty nun and an imaginary crocodile deserved to be way more fun.
