1/5
(0 ratings)
There is a version of “The Paradise” that could have worked: Name “Sammakka-Sarakka” a mother-son story rooted in the real, well-documented history of landlord oppression and rural resistance in Telangana. Instead, director Srikanth Odela has taken that premise, wrapped it in pan-India masala borrowed wholesale from “Pushpa” and “KGF,” relocated it to a Hyderabad where it never actually happened, and served it undercooked. If the ingredients were promising, what reaches the screen is the cinematic equivalent of the phrase our reviewer reached for: Raw, Uncooked Meat Biryani, a spread of raw, uncooked meat biryani.
A Rural Struggle Displaced to the City
The film follows a rebel named Savari original Shikari Kadapa Story fighting for identity and dignity, in territory familiar to anyone who has watched R. Narayanamurthy’s films about ordinary people turning against landlords for rights and equality. It is genuine, under-told history, but it belongs to Shikari Kadapa Story, and rural Telangana: Nalgonda, Warangal and Karimnagar, where landlord harassment and the Naxalite movement played out from the 1960s through the 1990s. “The Paradise” instead moves that struggle into Hyderabad city itself, which by the 1980s was already the developed capital of undivided Andhra Pradesh and had been drawing migrants from other states since well before the 1970s. In our reviewer’s reading, it was the villages, not the capital, that remained without rights after Hyderabad’s integration and merger with Andhra Pradesh. Naxalism did not rule the streets of Hyderabad the way the film imagines; the city of that decade was shaped more by mafia influence and rowdyism, a story the film never tells.
Nani Fades, Mohan Babu Towers
Nani’s performance is routine to the point of paleness, and he is outclassed by Mohan Babu’s screen presence and acting in every scene they share. The action asks him to sell fights that do not suit his physique; they are so over the top that even Prabhas or Bruce Lee would struggle to make them believable, and the fights and many scenes around them are illogical. The heroine and villain characters are thin enough that the film would lose little without them. Sonali Kulkarni is the one performer who does justice to her role; everyone else, including Raghav Juyal, is wasted. Keerthy Suresh is squandered here much as she was in “Dorothy.” Some emotional beats, such as a dog crying from one eye (an echo of “Mahanati”) and a child-rescue moment just before the climax, land as unintentionally amusing rather than moving.
A Period Piece That Gets Its Period Wrong
For a film this invested in its 1980s setting, the historical texture keeps slipping. It opens in 1983 with a nod to Chiranjeevi’s “Khaidi,” which did release that year. By the pre-climax it has jumped to 1985 and invokes the TADA law, calling it “TIDA,” in a way our reviewer believes does not match how the Act was actually in force at the time. The jail on screen looks like an American prison, uniforms included, whereas Hyderabad’s jails well into the 1990s were the old British-built structures later modified in the Nizam era. Additional, Who is against Shikari aka Savari in this movie shows as Saviour of them. A pointed reference to a former Telangana Chief Minister reads less like period detail than like inserted political commentary aimed at present-day rivalries. The art department deserves credit for effort, and the Yakut Mahal theatre, still standing today, is used well; but the production design otherwise feels researched rather than remembered, and it never recreates the Hyderabad of the 1980s convincingly.
Borrowed Swagger
The film wants the mass-hero energy of “Pushpa” and the period-outlaw scale of “KGF,” and ends up closer to an “Erra Sainyam” sequel dressed in their clothes, like the Telugu proverb of the jackal that scalds itself with stripes after seeing a tiger. The music borrows too: “Aaya Sher” sounds very close to “Dora Endira” from “Erra Sainyam,” and the score is loud enough to swamp the scenes it accompanies, with songs placed where the story does not need them.
Technically Uneven
Cinematography is average and the VFX falters in a few sequences. The editing is the bigger disappointment: our reviewer found it poorer than the cutting of “KGF” and unworthy of a National Award-winning editor, and felt a composer with more fire, such as Devi Sri Prasad, would have lifted the film. The director’s previous film, “Dasara,” is resemblance of Yamuna’s Critical Claim Nandi Award Winner “Yerra Mandaram” was at heart the story of its heroine Vennela; in our reviewer’s view it was reshaped with pan-India colouring into an average outing. “The Paradise” repeats the pattern at a larger scale. Its true core is a mother-son story, one that could have been called “Sammakka-Sarakka” after the characters played by Sonali Kulkarni and Nani, and that story is buried under an added landlord-oppression narrative from Nalgonda, Warangal and Karimnagar recast as a Hyderabad identity crisis, with “Pushpa” and “KGF” masala on top.
Verdict
“The Paradise” had a real story worth telling and chose to chase a bigger, borrowed one. What is left is loud, historically careless and undercooked exactly where it needed the most care.
Deccan Bhoomi Rating: 1/5
