Telugu legend Chiranjeevi’s new film Khaidi No. 150 , his first in ten years, is a huge success, currently shattering box-office records. In comparison Chiranjeevi’s son Ram Charan Teja’s latest film Dhruva released as few weeks earlier has proven to be a tame money spinner, thereby proving the irrefutable staying-power of star fathers from Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra in Bollywood to Kamal Haasan and Chiranjeevi in the South, who are doing far better in their acting careers than their progenies.
Sources in the know from the Telugu film industry say that father and son - Chiranjeevi and Ram Charan, now plan to share screen space in a two-hero film.
“Ram Charan’s career needs some fresh blood, that his father has shattered records after a 10-year gap is an eye-opener to Ram Charan. When Ram Charan appears in the film for a song with his father the theatres roar in approval. It’s time the two generations of Chiranjeevi’s family came together, and a project is being planned with the two of them as father and son,” says an insider.
Qualitatively Ram Charan’s Dhruva is a superior film. In Dhruva we could see the young actor attempting to change the way we look at Telugu cinema. The grammar of the action scenes were different and the presentation and packaging were far slicker. Ram Charan had worked hard on his body language, the lack of acting chops compensated for by the attention paid to building athletic muscles.
Except for the hair dye, Chiranjeevi doesn’t even try. Khaidi No 150 is an unabashed celebration of the status quo. Whatever Chiranjeevi’s fans have come to expect from their iconic star, he delivers, in ample measures. There is the action, dancing and romancing all done in the trademark Chiranjeevi style. There are two roles for the star to perform. He plays them with a gusto akin to twins occupying a kabbaddi match from two sides of the line. He brings no distinction between the two characters who are as interchangeable as two wheels of an automobile.
It is evident that Chiranjeevi has aged biologically. His cinema, though remains stuck at what he used to do when he was 24 or 35 or 48. In that sense, Chiranjeevi’s cinema is ageless, though the tell-tale signs of jadedness are scattered everywhere in this long rambling, at times incoherent but uniformly adulatory film about a do-gooder who could have been a politician.
There is a disarming pliability about Chiranjeevi’s personality in Khaidi No 150. He seems to be telling his fans that he would do anything to please them, as long as they don’t demand any unreasonably excessive levels of aesthetic gratification from his cinema. Khaidi No 150 with its garish visuals and an exaggerated emotional palate that has its origins in our naat-shastra culture, bombards our senses with furious volumes of noise, violence and melodrama. This could be a film from the 1980s masquerading as a new-age entertainer and getting away with the fraudulence because….well, Chiranjeevi can get away with anything, including the girl, Kajal Aggarwal, who re-defines the ‘damsel in distress’.
Everything is theatrical about the presentation. Nothing is what it seems, not even Chiranjeevi, who is actually a 60-year old man pretending to be as agile and rakish as 30-year old. To his credit Chiranjeevi pulls this charade off much more convincingly than his southern peer Rajnikanth. But not convincing enough to make us believe that the ten years he was away from camera have magically been erased from Chiranvjeevi’s birth certificate.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)