Waltair Veerayya

murder, violence, workplace harassment

• Title: Waltair Veerayya
• Cast: Chiranjeevi, Rajendra Prasad, Ravi Teja, Shruthi Haasan…
• Director: Bobby Kolli
• Music Director: Devi Sri Prasad

Seethapthi (Rajendra Prasad) seeks the help of Waltair Veerayya (Chiranjeevi) to take revenge on Solomon Caesar (Bobby Simha) who murdered all of Seethapathi’s colleagues. When Veerayya finally kills Solomon, it is revealed that he already knew Solomon and his brother Michael (Prakash Raj). How Michael and Veerayya know each other and how they resolve their conflict is the rest of the movie.

The story is a mediocrely written revenge story with predictable character outcomes.

• Direction: With no surprises or complex storylines, the movie should have moved at a quicker pace. The straightforward revenge story was distracted by stardom on screen.
• Acting: With one-dimensional characters, most of the actors aren’t given much space to act. Shruthi Haasan’s character had unrealistic lines and scenes, which were amped up by her awkward screen presence. Chiranjeevi’s performance as a fisherman was not believable or entertaining. His accent, which ebbed and flowed, was painful to listen to. Ravi Teja’s performance minus his flimsy accent was one of the better parts of the movie. Rajendra Prasad gave the best and the most realistic show. Prakash Raj who did justice to his lines, was given a weakly written character.
• Cinematography: It seemed like most of the creative team was focused on Chiranjeevi rather than bringing value to the movie as a whole. The shots of Veerayya during fights served their purpose.
• Production Design: Watching the movie, it doesn’t seem like there was a shortage in the budget but rather disproportional allocation to unnecessary elements. During the flashback, the village looked artificial and was an obvious setup. At least half of the scene sets were not fully developed. Karuppan’s A-frame cabin setup is laughable.
  The CGI was not acceptable. The scene in the ship/boat was clearly fake. In the fight scenes, the blood and wounds had an animated quality that was distracting.
• Editing: The flow of the movie was consistent from the beginning. The editing did well moving the story along with what they were given.
• Music: The lyrics were lazy and boring, a large portion of them dedicated to hyping up Chiranjeevi. Veerayya’s background score was energetic but the lyrics took away from it.
• Dialogues: A lot of the dialogues were unnatural. They speak for themselves when it comes to quantity over quality.
• Themes: The revenge story is rooted in brotherhood. However, the scenes that build the brothers’ story don’t reel the audience in.

• How creative decisions are made as a team sometimes goes beyond my understanding. It seems this team thinks that romanticizing music can cover up any sort of lazy writing and resulting behaviors.
  • Shruthi Haasan’s character is a customer-facing role in a hotel. Veerayya takes advantage of the favor she does for him (which is not realistic in the first place). Throughout their interactions, he continues to harass her, and behind this is romantic music. Nauseating.
  • It’s known this movie isn’t grounded in being realistic, but the extent to which absurdity is normalized speaks to what is deemed to be quality content. In the fight scene leading up to Solomon’s murder, festival dancers for no apparent reason start dancing behind Veerayya and are unfazed as he single-handedly inflicts violence on a group of people. The number of times random characters stroke Veerayya’s ego brings up the question – who is this movie actually for?
  • As if women need more objectification, Veerayya walks into a party with two random women as supposed arm candy. Why?
  • The RAW agents who were supposedly on top of things up until Veerayya inserts himself into their operation, suddenly take a backseat – no one questions this
• Hats off to the backup dancers who took on the responsibility of filling a void in energy, there were some fun shots with large crowds of people dancing in ‘Boss Party’ and ‘Poonakalu Loading.’

No. I don’t even see this movie being fun for Chiranjeevi fans. The lack of quality art and the need to stroke egos make this movie a tough and cringeworthy watch.

• I couldn’t help myself and counted a total of 13 references to Chiranjeevi’s old movies and 10 instances where Veerayya was hyped up. With a runtime of 155 minutes, that is an average of one shoutout to him about every 6.7 minutes. [Disclaimer: I may have not identified every reference made.]
  • Personally, the Tagore/Idiot reference scene was actually fun – too many scenes not spaced out enough took the fun out of it.
  • I identified 3 shoutouts to Ravi Teja’s past movies, which didn’t bother the experience.
  • One shout out to Shruthi Haasan’s past movie.
• My favorite ridiculous moment of the movie was the cocaine explosion. They blow up truckloads of cocaine, and everyone is covered in residue yet it affects no one.
  • In this scene Michael’s character suddenly starts behaving weakly to add comedic value to the scene – I guess the cocaine in the air could explain that.
• Nitpick: In the beach fight, Michael’s dub changes for less than half a minute.
• There is a shot of a protest with every sign looking hot off the press having the same size, color, and font – possible, definitely not probable.
• Tacky shirts don’t make a fisherman a fisherman.
• There were certain moments in the fights that looked similar (if not the same) to other movies also choreographed by Ram and Laxman.

Movie Rating: 2/10

Maguva Impact Scale: -2