In K M Chaitanya’s Aa Dinagalu (2007), actor Atul Kulkarni, playing gangster Agni Sreedhar, says man is the biggest weapon in the underworld. “The rest are just properties,” he adds. The yesteryear Kannada crime drama, based on the real incidents from a big chapter of the Bengaluru underworld, stood out for its understated storytelling.

In Balaramana Dinagalu, which has the skeleton of a sequel to Aa Dinagalu, weapons are seen in the first scene. As the film progresses, we encounter an arsenal of knives, razors, machetes, and guns — each an extension of the gangsters’ identities and an indispensable tool in their quest to remain feared and lethal. Chaitanya attempts to make the movie a mix of reality and entertaining tropes.

The director has roped in the same cast, who played the dreaded gangster trio of Kotwal Ramachandra (essayed by Sharath Lohitashwa), Jayaraj (Ashish Vidyarthi), and Agni Sreedhar (Atul) in Aa Dinagalu. That’s what makes one instantly curious about Balaramana Dinagalu. The only difference in the latest movie from the previous one is the fictionalised names of the real dons. Jayaraj becomes Jayaram, Sreedhar is Shashidhar, and Muthappa Rai is called Monnappa Rai (played by Ramesh Indira).

Even if these characters are the big draw in the movie, the plot revolves around the journey of Balarama, a character with a small yet significant presence in Aa Dinagalu. Vinod Prabhakar’s portrayal of the titular role is the film’s biggest takeaway. He makes us feel for the character, and is quite impressive in the final portions of the movie, where Balarama struggles to break free from the underworld’s trap.

Balaramana Dinagalu is impressive when it reflects the psychology of a gangster. Jayaram is shown helping the needy while Balarama urges young boys to focus on education. It’s as if these men who commit heinous acts, have a heart as well. Shashidhar is often called “intellectual gangster”, as the film reflects how the underworld fears well-read men in the field. Politicians and policemen, the supposedly the protectors of people being part of the crime nexus, strengthen the movie’s world-building.

The film falters in its inability to rise above the plot’s predictability. Balarama’s journey is no different from the often-seen life of an innocent man from a small town who becomes a gangster owing to uncontrollable circumstances. I wish the film had delved a bit more into Balaram’s personality. Why does he not resist becoming a gangster? What dreams did he have when he moved to Bengaluru from a small town?

“My hands speak louder than my words,” says Balarama. This signals that he is someone who settles conflicts with fists rather than conversations. Despite this detail, Balaram’s entry into the underworld feels too sudden. The predictability strips the sheen away from the well-shot action sequences, as the result of every fight is known beforehand.

Chaitanya is careful not to glorify the act of violence. He wants to portray the negative effects of violence on the children in a family, as the movie ends with a hard-hitting frame. It’s impressive that the actor-director duo has delivered a non-hero-worshipping gangster saga.

That said, the movie could have benefited from a couple of gripping episodes. While it’s important not to romanticise the life of a gangster, there is no harm in delivering moments of peak tension, the biggest plus of the genre. 

The assassination of Jayaram, the impact of Kotwal’s elimination on the underworld, or the Sakleshpura incident involving Monnappa Rai, had the potential to offer edge-of-the-seat, high-stakes portions, but they are rushed. The love story is simple, but it lacks emotional intensity between the lead couple. Santhosh Narayanan’s dance numbers are forgettable (despite it being his forte) while his montage melodies are beautiful.

Balaramana Dinagalu adopts a restrained, almost clinical approach to the gangster genre. While that keeps it from glorifying violence, it also leaves the narrative feeling a touch too neat and emotionally muted.

Balaramana Dinagalu is currently running in theatres

Published – June 28, 2026 07:58 pm IST

Perhaps there’s a certain irony in a story about a fireworks factory mostly keeping away from explosive drama. Yoshitoshi Shinomiya‘s lowkey feature directorial debut A New Dawn is at the very least visually captivating, comprised of lush and rather hypnotic production design. The story is small scale focusing on a trio of friends who try to save a fireworks factory in their hometown, but the imagery feels expansive and lush. A New Dawn begins with a beautiful and vaguely familiar display of this beauty: the flowing, painterly imagery of its opening sequence recalls Shinomiya’s work on the flashback sequence in Makoto Shinkai‘s your name., immediately showing that the film’s visuals might transcend its small town drama.

A background artist himself on films by Makoto Shinkai as well as the similarly resplendent Pompo: The Cinéphile, it makes sense that this history would be felt in the background works of A New Dawn. They’re dense with detail, rich with almost luminous color and illustrative texture. Shinomiya, who also wrote and storyboarded the film, veers away from the photorealism associated with someone like Shinkai through some impressionist touches – like the splotches of green paint which represent treelines – which sometimes turns into outright abstraction like when a character begins to run through the space. Sometimes there are swaying, morphing textures in the background as splotches of paint subtly shift around. On a more intimate level, the cluttered and characterful interior spaces tell a story too. This is a long-winded way of saying A New Dawn looks really, really good.

It’s not just in the tableaux of its countryside habitats and ramshackle living spaces carved out of abandoned warehouses, but there’s a sense of invention permeating through A New Dawn‘s various experiments with visual languages of animation. The most prominent is an incredibly charming stop motion animated sequence using a cardboard diorama and real human hands invading the shot in a creative reflection of a drunken character’s perspective. Even though it broadly still looks “anime” through its character design, there are also smaller details which work to set A New Dawn apart from its contemporaries, touches like its occasional lineless artwork or the way rain is defined through smudged black brushstrokes.

It’s in the screenwriting where A New Dawn begins to feel more run of the mill. Its story about the constant chasing of the majesty of a fabled firework “Shuhari” feels both familiar in its premise but also a little bit alienating in its structure. The importance of the firework itself never feels clear – the moment its mystery is unravelled hardly feels like a revelation as a result, something amplified by how the writing often obfuscates what anyone is talking about. The whole story feels a little distancing, and despite the allure of the background art and design of the spaces the characters inhabit, the people themselves feel constantly at arms length.

It almost pulls things back with its climax – the detonation of the “Shuhari” goes a long way in justifying the circular conversations about its nature and origins – a painted streak of light launches into the sky before turning into something otherworldly, suddenly tripling down on the film’s captivating exaggerations.

The best weapon in the “Jackass’” arsenal isn’t the taser, the beehive or the booby-trapped latrine. It’s the explosion of relief when a prank ends, often in humiliation, always with hoots and claps. The first film, 2002’s “Jackass: The Movie” was slow to discover that carnage without camaraderie is painful; several injuries limped off-screen in horrified silence. Laughter heals, except for the brain hemorrhage that Johnny Knoxville suffered in 2022’s “Jackass Forever” when, dissatisfied by the clobbering he took from a bull, requested a second ramming that knocked him out cold.

Hence “Jackass: Best and Last,” the goon squad’s alleged final film, is underwhelmingly tame. Shot quickly by stalwart director Jeff Tremaine this spring, half of it is a clip reel of past hits, like the time fan favorite Steve-O slingshotted into the sky in a port-a-potty. The rest is scraps of hastily assembled chaos, the most elaborate of which is a puppet show in which veterans Ehren McGhehey, Dave England and Jason “Wee Man” Acuña dangle helplessly from strings, trying to recite cue cards while being pummeled by tropical fruit. “A pineapple!” Wee Man moans.

I’m no sadist. They’ve suffered plenty for our amusement. Still, it’s a shame that for the first time in two and a half decades of cringe comedy, the guffaws feel forced.

Acknowledging the Jackasses’ age, if not maturity, are a couple skits about prostate and rectal checkups. (The gnarliest involves clear pants, colonoscopy prep liquid and a game of Twister.) Modern technology enters the arena with a nimble-fingered robot. If the team had invested any actual energy into brainstorming this entry, they’d have played paintball with a sniper drone. At least for the sake of torch-passing, someone should have thought of something for the newish members introduced in “Jackass Forever” to do besides stand around and applaud.

These fresher faces — Jasper Dolphin, Rachel Wolfson, Zach Holmes — prove brave and resilient when allowed to participate. Only one of them, Sean “Poopies” McInerney, a surf bro so gullible that I’m not sure he’s capable of informed legal consent, fits into “Best and Last” like a well-worn punching bag. (When Poopies yelps that “my mind is getting to me” while wearing a shock collar around a sensitive area, people snort because, as sweet as he seems, the only thing rattling inside his cranium is a moth.) Early on, Poopies gets swollen lip injections that, someone claims, will last the whole movie. You expect his trophy wife pout to be a running sight gag. But his disfigurement never even gets another closeup.

“Jackass” started with a bang. In January of 1998, Knoxville, then a 26-year-old aspiring actor, strapped on a cheap bulletproof vest padded with a stack of “Hustler” magazines and fired a gun point-blank into his chest. His dumb derring-do went viral on VHS tapes, earning him an MTV show and five feature films. Watching that Rosetta Stone-cold stupid footage here, you’re struck not only by his audacity, but by the scene’s excruciating comic pacing. As there’s only one bullet in the pistol, empty chambers click multiple times before the bullet finally fires. Logically, you know Knoxville will live long enough for his hair to turn fright-wig white. Yet the lizard brain making you gawk is shrieking.

Do not attempt any of the stunts you’re about to see, the prefatory caution blares. Absolutely. The thing is, no one else could. “Best and Last’s” flashbacks are a walloping reminder that Knoxville is inimitable: a telegenic and extroverted entertainer with a charisma he wields like a skunk aims its stink. Upset him at your own risk. Like Buster Keaton before him, Knoxville has an uncanny awareness of how his death-defying escapades appear on camera. Even in that near-suicidal early segment, note how Knoxville stays on his feet, enduring agony with a magician’s “Ta-da!” He might have given himself a bruise the size of a baseball but he’s focused on the audience’s delight.

Over the years, the visuals dramatically improve, from snuff film aesthetics to confidently silly splendor. “Jackass Number Two,” released in 2006, expended major energy on a musical homage to Old Hollywood that nodded to Keaton and bathing beauty Esther Williams who, in MGM’s “Million Dollar Mermaid,” plunged 50 feet into a pool and broke her neck. By 2010’s “Jackass 3D,” which riffed on classic cartoons with Knoxville strapping himself onto an Acme-style red rocket, one could admit they went to see a Jackass movie for the cinematography with even more sincerity than if Knoxville claimed he bought “Hustler” for its life-saving properties.

The new movie doesn’t have any artistic ambition. The charitable excuse for its reliance on old material is that the gang wanted one more film that summed up their entire legacy — from the impact of seeing them age to the opportunity to include departed colleagues Ryan Dunn, who died in 2011, and Bam Margera, fired in 2020. The other explanation is it’s a cash grab made for pennies. Still, Steve-O strives for memorable moments, gathering the gang in a generic office building corridor to watch him take off his pants and pop out a ping-pong ball. There’s a lot of nudity but the setting feels half-assed.

“Best and Last’s” intro splat-tacular, typically a highlight of each film, hinges on the posse standing still on a moving floor. But the monochrome staging — white walls, white ground — looks almost like CGI, the antithesis of their appeal, and it takes us a minute to understand what’s actually going on. Worst, it lacks both suspense and surprise, that no-they-aren’t–oh-god-they-are drama that once elevated the franchise to the peak of pure cinema.

There is — and I mean this — existentialism in witnessing a person embrace shame and terror. Actors have won Oscars without achieving the transcendence of, say, misery glutton McGhehey in “Jackass Forever,” bound to a chair and coated in salmon and honey, realizing that his friends have released a bear into the room. Meryl Streep could never do that (and wouldn’t have to). McGhehey’s sole path to stardom is that he did.

Not everything in a “Jackass” movie needs to be that sublime. One of my few genuine howls in “Best and Last” came in a three-second rehash of someone stepping on a rake; another was the percussion Chris Pontius makes with his swinging nethers before attempting a naked Fosbury flop. There’s a great accidental gag in a cut bit from the original MTV pilot when a deputy pulls up to arrest Knoxville and forgets to put her car in park. Yet the snippet I keep thinking about is a throwaway beat in a new skit when McGhehey willingly gets into the wrong chair again and, once freed, attacks Knoxville who coolly knees him in the nuts. Everyone chuckles.

Once, in anthropology class, my professor lectured on an insular island tribe that cackled whenever someone got hurt. Schadenfreude was the community’s way to vent tension. I thought of that village throughout “Best and Last,” especially during Knoxville’s nonchalant disarmament of his pal. Team Jackass has stayed united even while at each other’s throats. In bad times, they’ve borne each other’s struggles with sobriety and mental health. In good, they’ve seen the inequality of success that’s left Knoxville in a better financial position to retire than the rest.

While “Best and Last” is a whiff, I can forgive this band of bozos’ urge to make it. No one seems happy to still be zapping themselves with electrodes. They just want to rally together for the final time to choke out one last laugh.