Disco Raja Telugu Movie Review

Disco Raja:

         Film maker VI Anand meanders till about half the film of the 150-minute narrative to permit Ravi Teja to get into his own. That long or there about the protagonist Disco Dancer is a somnambulist with a memory loss. Well it also seems to suggest the film maker too suffers a similar malady for having forgotten what works for Ravi Teja – at least at the box office. Loose unattended stands are thrown with a challenge to the viewer to tie up the knots. 

         It is nearly an hour into the narrative before one really cares to put things in perspective. It takes you back and forth in space and place: Ladakh, Goa, Chennai…. The script literally begs of Ravi Teja to come into his own and when he does, he is the same in every frame strutting his wares like he always does and he is the guy the audience loves to resist. 

         It is part sci fi, part romance, part the bad guy Vs the worse guy.  In the midst of the Teen Deviyaan, Ravi Teja is actually trying hard to evolve from Rajesh Khanna to Amitabh Bachchan in wooing his girl friend but ends up being Mithun.

         The story line begins at Ladakh where our hero has been tortured to bleed in the ice clad Ladakh. Soon his ice embalmed body finds itself at a science lab with the team of doctors: Dr. Shishir (Shishir Sharma), Phalguni (Vennela Kishore) and Parineeti (Tanya Hope) trying to resurrect the in-limbo corpus. Memory loss but brawl in tact victim (Ravi Teja) also does not know his name.  However, we have the likes of Kukuteshwar Rao (Naresh) walking into the family of Vasu (Ravi Teja) where the lady in waiting is one of the gals in Vaus’s life Nabha (Nabha Natesh). We also have a dumb Helen (Payal Rajput) surely dumb, vying for attention. There are also the baddies including cameo Jeeva and lengthy bad Sethu (Bobby Simha).

         What is the cause for the conflict? Actually, there is the daring devil Disco Dance into whose life we get to in a rewind that tells of his wild days and the past that is full of dramatics and dance and loud and dusty.

         Like all Ravi Teja films this must work around his star value.  It is a like it or leave it scene. Even his hard-core fans would find the going tuff for a long while he is not himself and for a long while he is lost in the seeming looks of the seventies and eighties. The three heroines are wasted and none have any role worth talking about. They make heavy weather of that too. The sidekicks like Vennela, Satyam Rajesh, Ramki, try to give some credence. As the leading baddie Bobby Simha tries to enthuse some interest and credence to the narrative. Like at the near end of the film where a character tells another that he has performed very well but would have to take his award elsewhere, it would be playing spoil sport to talk of a surprise performance from one of the actors.  Will make up some other time and somewhere else.  Speaking about him would be telling. 

         Disco Dancer is loud crass and no entertainment to even the Mass Maharaja fans unless mass is meant to be an innuendo. 

L. Ravichander.