The point of the film is to present Pawan Kalyan as wonderfully as possible. Mission accomplished! And there are some good set pieces. But the rest of the story is too loose to matter, and the film ends up just about watchable. That’s the brief review. A longer review follows, and it may contain spoilers.
They Call Him OG opens in 1940, in Tokyo. There’s some breathless voiceover storytelling about the samurai, the yakuza, and a secret cult called Black Dragon Society. All of this happens in the first ten minutes, but not to worry. In case you walked in late, you’ll find you haven’t missed anything. This is not a complaint. Pawan Kalyan plays Ojas Gambheera, i.e. OG. Sujeeth’s sole mission is to showcase his leading man as gloriously as possible – and that he does gloriously. Rarely has a mass-hero vehicle looked so good. Even the relentless bloodletting looks like spillovers from a candle-lit fine arts classroom. Ravi K Chandran is the cinematographer, and he shoots the film with intoxicating amber tones that make the scenes look like they are seen through a glass of Scotch. (Manoj Paramahamsa contributed some additional work.) Purely as a series of visuals set to Thaman’s pulsating score, OG cannot be dismissed – especially on the big screen.
“Purely as a series of visuals…” Perhaps that’s the only way to watch OG, because the story, which moves to the 1990s, is all over the place. The crux is about a container of RDX that’s being hunted by the villains – and there are many of them. There’s Sudev Nair as Jimmy. There’s Emraan Hashmi as his brother, Omi. Some films like John Woo’s Face/Off build the bond between evil brothers so well that you end up part-rooting for them. They almost seem to have a love story going on. Here, it wouldn’t matter even if Jimmy and Omi weren’t brothers – if they were just random gangsters. Arjun Das gets an arc that must have sounded amazing on paper, with Sriya Reddy playing his mother. At times, I felt he was the only opponent that our man OG needed. But the way this is screenplayed out blunts the power of this character’s trauma. He ends up looking like he is sulking.
I find it hard to dislike films that incorporate pulp touches like gold biscuits and a mid-air beheading and a bloody shirt being used as a red flag. Pawan Kalyan is in great form in a role that only requires his swag. There’s a terrific stretch where OG uses his samurai sword to slash through a group of enemies. Midway through the sequence, the camera moves up and we just see the canopy under which the action is taking place. As the camera moves, we see the canopy getting sliced by OG’s sword and getting patterned by the enemy-blood OG is spilling. At the end, the canopy flutters down on the slain men like a shroud. There’s another beautiful stretch in a police station where OG wonders if he should chop off a cop’s finger (in which case, he only needs a small knife) or his hand (in which case, a much bigger weapon is needed). It’s black humour tinted with red blood.
I would have been happy with a senseless story that was just a bunch of scenes like this. Sadly, Sujeeth decides to go all serious on us. He takes us to Madurai and gets Priyanka Arul Mohan as a love interest for OG. The reason for OG’s separation from his father figure (played by Prakash Raj) is hardly convincing. There’s a fantastic masala moment where someone says that their hand trembles, but the trembling stops the minute they hold a gun. But this drama is not built up. One may wonder if these are valid complaints in a movie meant to get the whistles going when Pawan Kalyan begins to fire a gun named “Johnny”, after the film he directed. But this film cannot make up its mind whether to do tongue-in-cheek star worship or actually tell a serious story timed around the Mumbai blasts. Whatever it is, it’s stylish, and it’s watchable. I guess that’s some kind of compliment, given the state of the mass-hero movie today.
