Chatrapathi Review: Utterly Outdated

There's nothing in Chatrapathi that you haven't already seen before, complains Mayur Sanap.

Chatrapathi, which marks Telugu star Sreenivas Bellamkonda's Bollywood debut, reeks of unoriginality.

It's not because it is a remake of S S Rajamouli's Telugu film of the same name from 2005.

A Mahadev's stale screenplay and Director V V Vinayak's uninspired approach invoke the been-there-seen-that-numerous-times-before feeling for viewers.

Not among his best work, the original Chatrapathi worked because of Rajamouli's flamboyant vision. There was an air of coolness and a more visceral grittiness to that film.

This remake had an opportunity to put a fresh spin, but barring a few geographical changes, this film stays too faithful to the source material, leaving no room for any significant improvement.

The story is pretty basic and predictable.

It follows the stale template of the rise of the messiah, who eventually becomes the saviour of the oppressed.

It throws in elements of bechari maa and her adarsh beta to form the melodramatic backstory for the hero.

Chatrapathi delivers very little. It strays from telling an engaging story and focuses too much on Sreenivas' action skills.

The plot itself makes little sense and the reasoning behind just about everyone's actions is flat-out absurd.

This results in an inconsistent film that tries too hard to throw in futile twists and turns as the film moves toward its foreseeable conclusion.

During its runtime of 124 minutes, Chatrapathi lurches from one action set piece to another with slow-mo shots of the hero showing off his action moves.

Everything is dialled up to 10: Be it the background score, sounds of kicks and punches, and the swag of the hero who is doing it all.

The grotesque violence throughout the movie is over-the-top and mindless.

Everything about the film feels lame including the bland lead performance from Sreenivas, who is otherwise impressive in action scenes.

For the Bollywood launch vehicle, he gets an all-encompassing role in which he is doing action, dance, romance, drama, and dialoguebaazi, but the actor falls short to make us root for his character Shiva.

The jarring lip sync to dubbed Hindi dialogues further dilutes his impact.

Nushrratt Bharuccha plays the decorative heroine that I thought was a thing of the past.

With nothing significant to chew on, NB is there to mollycoddle the hero and look perplexed when he is fighting the baddies.

Bhagyashree as the weepy mother isn't given much to work with past clichéd character traits and stilted dialogue.

Sharad Kelkar, Freddy Daruwala and Amith Nair play the villains that induce yawns more often than alarms.

Remake status aside, there's nothing in Chatrapathi that you haven't already seen before. Without an engaging story or interesting characters, the film is relegated to outdated actioner.