Vastadu Na Raju Review: Will Not Disappoint

Film: Vastadu Na Raju
Rating: 3/5
Banner: 24 Frames Factory
Cast: Vishnu, Taapsee, Prakashraj, Brahmanandam, Tanikella, Siva Reddy, Ali and others
Music: Mani Sharma
Cinematography: S Gopal Reddy
Story, screenplay, direction: Hemant Madhukar
Producer: Manchu Vishnuvardhan
Release date: 11/02/2011

Manchu Vishnu has arrived with another attempt to entertain the Telugu audience. Whether he is successful in this one or not, let us see.

Story:

Venky (Vishnu) is a happy go lucky young man and his dream is to become a Kick Boxing champion. He doesn’t believe in love as he considers it time waste.

On the other hand, there is Narasimha (Prakashraj), a henchman for the Home Minister (Sayaji) and his dream is to become an MLA. To achieve his dream, he also commits to the Home Minister that he will give his sister Pooja (Taapsee) hand to the HM rogue son Ajay (Ajay).

However, a sequence of events takes place which mislead Narasimha to think that Pooja is in love with Venky. He attacks Venky family and in no time Venky also shows his reaction. What is that reaction? Are Venky and Pooja really in love? All this forms the rest of the story.

Performances:

Manchu Vishnu has given a sincere attempt. He should be appreciated for cutting down ample weight on his body and choosing a far better story this time after ‘Saleem’.  However, he has to work on few areas. First, his voice modulation has to improve to deliver that heroic feel. Secondly, he must put on some mass on his body and build few muscles apart from that single tricep he shows in one scene. Being a kick boxer, he should have enough machismo and physique which was missing here.

Taapsee looks like a doll and while she scores with her innocent looks in regular scenes, she raises the heat with her oomph factor in songs. She has improved compared to her debut film in terms of performance. But she needs to focus on fitness as this is right time. She has tendency of putting on weight faster.

Prakashraj is good and did complete justice to his role. Watching him in one of the songs in a funny get up was nice.

Brahmanandam is good at few places, Tanikella is elegant, Tulasi was alright, Ajay is not used to his full potential, Jeeva is usual, Sayaji Shinde is brief. It is good to see Sathya Krishnan back on the screen. Surekha is humorous; Satyam Rajesh, Siva Reddy and Bobo Sasi are there to fill the screen. The others did their bit as required.

Highlights

    * Songs and music
    * Manchu Vishnu’s dialogue on ‘Andhra, Rayalaseema, Telangana Debba’ during the fight sequence.
    * Taapsee glamour quotient

Drawbacks

    * Vishnu’s dialogue on greatness of Telugu people. Many compared it to Mohan Babu delivering it and Vishu was unable to give that punch.
    * Vishnu’s lack of energy in emotional scenes
    * Physique of Vishnu that’s not convincing as a kick boxer.

Analysis:

Hemant Madhukar who made his first film in Bollywood seems to have read the commercial pulse of the audience correctly. He didn’t try to experiment too much and made it a clean entertainer. Though there were few hiccups here and there, he was able to put enough pace in the scenes and kept the audience busy.

There was a proper mix of romance, humor, sentiment which makes up for a perfect formula entertainer. He should have focused on the technical aspects and fine tuned few comedy sequences.

Especially for this kind of story line and presentation idea, the screenplay and dialogue should be filled with better humor. People may compare it with Dhee or Ready. But repeating the same wouldn’t give any impact. It should be above them to score the highest mark. And frankly to say, the humor and entertainment quotient in Dhee and Ready are above ‘VNR’.

On a whole, the dialogues were good at few places, second half got dragged a bit, this could be trimmed.  The production values were good and few scenes had rich presentation. Overall, this is a film that will appeal for B, C center audience provided they watch with no big expectations.