OK, yeah, it’s Christmas Day when this goes live. This is not a Christmas movie. It’s one of the surprise hits of 2022. Basically, I have a mental list of movies I want to get to, either at home or in theaters, between now and New Years, and the three hour action epic with the occasional dance-off has been on my Netflix watchlist for months. I saw a lot of folks online raving about it. And if I want to give Indian cinema a try, this seemed as good an entry way as any.
Oh, it was worth it.
RRR, which stands for Rise, Roar, Revolt, tells the story of two historic Indian revolutionaries and their fictional friendship. That is the shortest way possible to explain what this movie is about. It’s not a difficult plot or anything to understand. If anything, it’s rather simplistic in many ways. In British-occupied India, two men who are veritable supermen have opposing missions. Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan) is a soldier in the British army, compared to fire, whose first scene has him launch himself into a very large crowd of protesters to apprehend one man who threw a rock at a framed portrait of the king. The calmer Komaram Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr), compared to water, is a protector for a more rural tribe who participates in tiger hunts by acting as the bait. Both men have performed a superhuman fete before the title of the movie even pops up, and that’s about forty minutes into a three hour film.
Given how the movie sets things up, the pair are clearly going to be headed for a confrontation. The British governor (Ray Stevenson) and his miserable wife (Alison Doody) are pretty much the face of British evil. In the opening scene, they basically take a young girl from her village since she has some talent for henna painting, and to show just how evil the governor is, he has a speech on how bullets are worth more than an Indian, so it’s best to not waste them when blunt objects are much more readily available when someone needs to die for the crime of wanting their own child back. Bheem is the guardian of the tribe, and his people warned the governor to give the girl back or else Bheem, a man whose face and identity they don’t have, will come and get her. Raju vows to bring the guardian in to get a promotion he’s been passed over for due to his race from the looks of things. But since neither man knows what the other is all about, when they both end up rescuing a boy from a fiery train wreck, that they actually wind up being friends, with Raju even going so far as to help Bheem romance the governor’s niece Jenny (Olivia Morris), the only English character in the entire movie that isn’t the slightest bit evil.
Of course, both of them end up learning who they are, Raju has some secrets, and they’ll eventually team up so both of them can succeed in their missions. There are wild animal attacks, a single gunman holding off an entire British army battalion from the looks of things, a bit of romance, and Bheem and Raju prove their prowess with a massive dance-off that exhausts all the British men trying to prove their cultural and racial superiority over the locals. This is a bonkers sort of movie, not exactly a realistic depiction of, oh, anything. The movie opens with some text saying there was no animal abuse because all the animals in the movie (save I am guessing some of the horses) are CGI, and quite frankly, none of them looked that real to me.
But that’s essentially what RRR is: not exactly something that looked real, but something that looked surreal. The action scenes are bold and somewhat cartoonish, where the two men will run around, one riding the other’s shoulders while duel welding two shotguns that he never misses with. A flogging will lead to a revolt when the man being whipped starts singing. There’s a lot of style on display, and while I wouldn’t necessarily want to go check out more Indian movies as a result of this one, I really dug the hell out of this one. If you’re looking to watch one Indian movie, this looks to be like a great one to go with.
Grade: A
0 Comments