Your friendship is more valuable than this life, brother.
I thought I might be going into RRR a bit more prepared than some audience members. RRR isn’t actually a Bollywood film, but, as a Tollywood film, it’s very much of a piece with Bollywood film in terms of its style and content. I’ve seen more than a few Bollywood films, so I wondered if the rapturous response to RRR was due to a lot of audiences seeing a film like this for the first time. Barnstorming musical numbers existing next to over-the-top action performances and melodramatic performances telling an incredibly emotional story of family and brotherhood; I’ve seen all that in other films from India. I should say that I have always loved those movies, so I still expected to enjoy RRR.
But I have to say that, even going in as a viewer with a passing familiarity with this style of Indian cinema, I was absolutely blown away by RRR. It’s a movie that takes all of the standard hallmarks that I mentioned above and just amps them up to an even higher level. RRR really is nothing short of an action epic and it deserves to stand as a classic of the genre; probably just a classic period, if you know what I mean.
I sometimes say that you will know by the time the title card happens whether a movie is for you or not. That’s certainly true this time, but it’s hardly surprising since the title card finally appears a whopping forty minutes into the movie. We’ve already seen the kind of action filmmaking that we’re going to get here which is over-the-top, brash, bold and completely gripping by the time those three Rs roar out of the screen at us. We’ve also been introduced to our main characters, Komaram Bheem and Alluri Raju, and so we’ve figured out something about the performances, namely that N.T. Rama Rao Jr., as Bheem, and Ram Charan, as Raju, just pop off the screen with sheer charisma and intensity. They’re compelling to watch on their own; as their friendship and brotherhood develops, the chemistry between the two of them is fantastic. By the time the action sequence where the two first meet and cooperate to save a young child from a fire was over, I was reeling and exuberant. When the action sequence closes on the two of them running toward each other, underwater, by the way, and clasping hands, I realized that I’d just seen an action sequence so good that most movies would use it as their climax. Those clasped hands would be a great freeze frame for the final shot of a movie. In this movie? We’ve still got two-and-a-quarter hours to go.
Talking about the movie more past this opening pre-titles sequence is a fool’s errand, I think. I simply can’t talk about the other things I love about this movie without just going through a litany of sequences so long that if I went in detail, this review would take forever. Allow me to just rattle off a few key scenes. The astonishing Naatu Naatu musical sequence is jaw-dropping, even in the context of other Indian films I’ve seen. A late night attack on a fortress that utilizes wild animals is a thrilling, completely ridiculous scene that had me sitting up in my seat; it’s a scene that has a character attaching a giant, flaming brazier to his arm which he then uses as a giant fist to punch a tiger out of the air. And that’s not even the end of the scene. There’s a public flogging scene that is probably the emotional heart of the film, a real gut-wrenching, beautifully filmed sequence. A lengthy flashback to Raju’s childhood is also an emotional highlight. And what can you say about a film where the main antagonist (a fantastically evil and hissable Ray Stevenson, who absolutely understands his assignment, in one of his final performances) is dispatched so that his blood sprays across a painting reading, “The sun never sets on the English Empire?”
Do I have ANYthing to criticize about this movie? I mean, look, the women get brutally short shrift here. I mean, that’s fair to say. It is a movie about brotherhood, of course, but with over 3 hours it seems just within the realm of possibility that they could have developed one female character to have at least 2 dimensions, if not a fully realized 3. But that’s just overall a small complaint given everything this movie does get right, from the action to the music to the spectacle to the moving exploration of brotherhood and the overall rousing and exuberant spirit. Just . . . just, my God, this is a MOVIE. 4 stars
tl;dr – astounding action epic is over-the-top, brash, bold and jaw-droppingly great in almost every way; emotionally gripping, intensely thrilling and exciting, a rare feat of entertainment. 4 stars.