Sivaji - Telugu - Review

A small review on Sivaji - The Telugu version.

1. Songs are out of the world. Remaining movie is right there on par with a Gemini TV serial. Production values etc are great for the songs and are totally ignored for the talkie part. The result is a jarring disconnect between the two.

2. Missing the Shankar mark. You feel his midas touch only in the songs. Rest of the movie feels like a regular B grade Tamil movie.

3. Missing the Rajni mark. Rajni is in almost every scene of the movie and has clearly lost his comic timing. His energy levels are down and it is high time he stopped romancing eighteen year old girls. The style elements are all in place but after a while you don't actually whistle when you see the same elements repeated umpteen times.

4. The movie has no continuity. It feels like a series of incidents and stops just at that. There's no proper story or an engaging screenplay. I doubt if Shankar really had a bound script before starting the movie. It feels as if the only story he had in his mind had exactly three words: "Black Money, Rajni"

SPOILER ALERT. STOP READING IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE YET.



5. Unbelievable holes in the script: Not expected in a Shankar movie. Since when has bringing the dead back from St Peters using CPR and shock treatment started working in 100% of the cases? And by the time Raghuvaran has laid his frail hands on Rajni - it is already thirty minutes (in cinematic time). By then even rigor mortis would have set in.

6. Take a hard disk which has password protected data. Take a sledge hammer now. Hit the hard disk as hard as possible to distort it completely. Now take the remains of the hard disk to some eminent organization like RAW. They will get the data on this disk in a day. CBI trying to use mimicry artists to get into the laptop is so 1970ish.

7. Rajni amassed 250 crores (10 dollars less. I stand corrected) in the USA by working as a software system architect? That means 50 million US dollars. Even with the assumption that he took about 20 years to get to this figure - he was saving at the rate of 2.5 million USD per year. Software System Architect? Where's that job buddy?

This is the worst Shankar movie I've seen and probably one of the worst Rajni movies till date. It reaffirms my faith that big directors when teaming up with big stars mess up things pretty badly. (STALIN - Murugadoss is another example though in restrospection - STALIN is handled in a much better way by Murugadoss.)

My verdict: Yawn. Wait for the DVD