Naayak: Formulaic

What does (a+b)² mean to you? Well, that’s Nayak for you. There goes one spoiler. Damn.

Even if I give away the entire plot with all the twists, chances are that you will still go ahead and watch the film. You might even come out enjoying it because the story is not the point at all. It is about how the whole works as a package and how faithfully Vinayak adheres to the success formula, which he had created himself. Going by the number of times he manages to tickle the ribs, one should say he has done well.

Nayak should not be judged on its intelligence because it is to miss the point completely. CCTV cameras record videos in HD, CBI officers drink on their duty and none of them have ever heard of any terms like DNA or fingerprints and the works. Its agenda is to make you laugh, laugh more and laugh harder. The film can boast of great performances by the support cast in eliciting guffaws through out its entire runtime. For a change it is Posani that spearheads the comedy track, Brahmanandam is his usual self and JP continues what he has done in Krishna. Together they make the film a fun-ride, one that you won’t mind despite its dangerous obsession with chopped limbs and severed legs. 

Ram Charan has done only four films prior to this but unfortunately he doesn’t have to do anything he has not done before. Kajal Agarwal and Amala Paul together have lesser screen time than Fish Venkat that is excluding the songs. If you include them, they come close. That does not seem a bad idea at all given how poorly their characters are written (or not written at all).

V V Vinayak looks uninterested in directing the action sequences but he gets his act right with the generous amount of comedy. The visuals are surprisingly tacky for such a high budgeted film and they could have certainly gone easy on that fish eye lens. Production design in Kolkata episodes is awful. All the songs are bad with special criticism reserved for Thaman’s Subhalekha Rasukunna, which is a brutal, terrible, Tarantinoesque murder of Ilaiya Raja’s classic.  

All in all a film which is targeted at the masses and plays it up to the galleries with numerous references to other stars in the family. There is not much to dislike and the film itself does not have any illusions of greatness.

Nothing to write home about. Ahh..well.