Adipurush movie review: Everybody wants to make the next Baahubali

Cast: Prabhas, Kriti Sanon, Saif Ali Khan, Sunny Singh, Devdatta Nage, Vatsal Sheth      

Director: Om Raut  

Language: Telugu / Hindi   

(Adipurush was made simultaneously in Telugu and Hindi. Our critic wrote this review after watching the Hindi version in 3D. The film has also been dubbed for release in Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.)

“Mummy, Mummy, look! I have technology!” This might have been a more apt title for the week’s much-hyped new release, Adipurush.

Writer-director Om Raut’s film is a retelling of the Ramayan, one of the most gripping tales ever told, with its many oral and written versions rivalling each other in colour and richness. Adipurush sucks the life out of its source material, and regurgitates it with sumptuous yet unimaginative VFX. A fortune has clearly been spent on the production, but an India that has already witnessed the lavishness of the Telugu blockbuster maker S.S. Rajamouli’s Bahubali parts 1&2 and RRR, is past the stage when we would lower our expectations and be happy to describe a CGI extravaganza as good “by Indian standards”. The challenge for Indian filmmakers now is that Indian standards are pretty darned high, and Adipurush, with its sallow storytelling accompanied by the limited inventiveness in its imagery simply does not cut it. This is surprising since Raut’s 2020 hit Tanhaji (Hindi) was, despite its dubious interpretation of history, engrossing due to its well-choreographed action. However politically problematic Rajamouli’s recent films may have been, even their severest critics could not accuse them of lacking a vision, substance and energy. The problem today is that everybody wants to make the next Bahubali, though obviously not everyone has the heft to do so.

Adipurush kicks off with a quick account of Ram, the prince of Ayodhya, being banished from the kingdom by the monarch, his father Dashrath, at the insistence of his stepmother. This part of the saga, along with Ram’s departure for the forests with his wife and brother Lakshman, are wrapped up with illustrations right at the start. When the live action begins with human actors, we meet the three primary characters in their jungle abode:  Raghav (another name for Ram in Hindu mythology) played by the Telugu megastar Prabhas, Janaki (one of Sita’s names) by Hindi cinema’s Kriti Sanon, and Shesh or Lakshman by Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2’s Sunny Singh. The film may as well have used animated hand drawings instead, considering that the actors appear to have been instructed to impersonate wax dolls.

Surpanakha, Ravan a.k.a. Lankesh, Jatayu, Hanuman a.k.a. Bajrang, Vali, Sugreev, Mandodari, Meghnad, Vibhishan, Kumbhakaran and others all enter the picture one by one, shorn of the detail so familiar to anyone who has grown up with the Ramayan. The only individual given any depth is Lankesh. The only one who tries to occasionally resuscitate this lifeless adventure is Saif Ali Khan in that role, but even he is overshadowed by the filmmaker’s apparent effort to impress with scale.

Adipurush’s visuals are often stunning, but their beauty becomes tiresome after a while as the lead trio stand posing around, and more time is spent on the camera gazing at them gazing into the distance than anything else. Karthik Palani’s cinematography is as painfully self-conscious as the acting, with each frame coming across as having been conceptualised in terms of how good it might look as a still than for its contribution to the narrative in a motion picture.

Certain elements do deserve a special mention: the grandeur of the ocean god emerging from the waters without taking full human form, the lethal metallic weapons racing up and down the walls of Lankesh’s fort, the representation of Lankesh’s 10-headed structure, and the breathtaking climactic confrontation between Raghav and Lankesh. Keep in mind though that Adipurush is almost three hours long, and a handful of stand-out sequences cannot compensate for long stretches of clichés and dullness or for that matter, smaller members of the “vaanar sena” that appear no better than children in badly made furry costumes in a kindergarten play.

Topping the triteness is the use of black to denote evil and white for virtue, as unthinking creative persons in large parts of the world do. The fascinating symbolism of the Ramayan is more or less left unexplored, but Lankesh, his people and setting are all in black and dark grey, Raghav and Shesh wear white dhotis, while the white-skinned Janaki spends her days in a pink outfit of such paleness that it is almost white. In fact, the colour scheme for Lankesh harks back to Saif’s own evil character from the Mughal establishment in Tanhaji, with a whiff of Ranveer Singh’s ravenous Alauddin Khilji in Padmaavat and the raging Pathans of Kesari added for good measure.

This can hardly be shrugged off as unintentional or innocent when Adipurush is viewed in the context of the present flammable political scenario. Besides, snuck quietly into the film are more transparent spots of pandering to the current aggressive majoritarian discourse: the opening VO describes the Ramayan as “Bharat ka itihaas” (India’s history), the episode involving Surpanakha is tweaked to villainise her, the Bhagwa dhwaj (saffron flag) gets an honourable mention by Raghav, and he exhorts his army to immortalise their masculinity.

Through all this, Sunny Singh has one expression on his face while Prabhas has 0.25 or maybe less. The latter’s take on divinity is a deadpan expression. He also does not walk, he lumbers, and his character has been given a weirdly strained running style – I cannot tell whether this is the fault of the artiste or the camerawork or some other technical aspect of filmmaking.

Sanon, an actor with tremendous spark that is under-explored in her filmography so far, is not allowed to look anything but pretty and powerless.

Devdatta Nage as Bajrang is impactless.

It’s no wonder then that Saif’s attempts at CPR – with an evil glint and a swag – fail miserably in the face of such insurmountable hurdles.

Rating: 1.5 (out of 5 stars) 

Adipurush is in theatres

Anna M.M. Vetticad is an award-winning journalist and author of The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic. She specialises in the intersection of cinema with feminist and other socio-political concerns. Twitter: @annavetticad, Instagram: @annammvetticad, Facebook: AnnaMMVetticadOfficial

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