A number of unanswered questions plague “Devara: Part 1,” the fine, but familiar Telugu-language Indian action drama and star vehicle for “RRR” co-lead N.T. Rama Rao Jr. For starters, does this nautical-themed melodrama need to be the first part of a series, and will the heavily foregrounded promise of a sequel leave anyone but NTR’s fans wanting more? It’s hard to know in either case, and not because “Devara: Part 1” doesn’t provide sufficient answers.

First, some good news. Writer/director Kortala Siva (“Acharya”) succeeds at making his ensemble cast, including Saif Ali Khan and Janhvi Kapoor, look great, especially during meme-ready action scenes and dance numbers. The movie’s plot also unfolds at such a deliberate pace that it’s hard to argue that the movie’s either too slow or too predictable to warrant its 176-minute runtime. Which brings me to the bad news.

Too often, the familiar and unchallenging nature of “Devara: Part 1”’s stock tropes and twists hold the movie back from unqualified success. Variations on established themes aren’t necessarily the worst things in the world, but it does get frustrating when you’re watching a giant-sized pirate drama that so regularly swings from perfunctory to rewarding gestures and usually within the same scene.

It’s easy to forget and doesn’t ultimately matter, but most of “Devara: Part 1” is presented as a dramatized cautionary tale for a group of hapless Bombay cops who, in 1996, try to hustle their way into a community of butch seamen. Local storyteller Singappa (Prakash Raj) eulogizes Devara (Rao) and later his son Vara (also Rao), both of whom lead a divided group of villagers near the Ratnagiri mountains. For a while, piracy serves as the community’s main source of income, as we see in an over-inflated but fitfully rousing opening scene where Rao launches out of the water in slow-motion like he’s the second coming of Esther Williams. Eventually, Devara changes his mind about piracy after learning more about the guns he and his crew smuggle for shifty middleman Muruga (Murali Sharma).

Tensions periodically flair between Devara, a selfless leader who can also fight and dance, and Bhaira (Khan), his generically contrary rival. They fight to a standstill during an annual weapons ritual, where four burly men duke it out to decide which of their four villages will control a cache of weapons. Even this establishing brawl takes a spell to catch fire, but it does once Devara and Bhair tie their wrists together and take turns bashing each other into various hard surfaces.

This and a few more conventional pleasures make the first half of “Devara: Part 1” a pleasant enough sit. The plot moseys more than it charges forward, and the movie only arrives at a dramatic precipice before its pre-intermission break. At this point, the drama stops being about Devara and Bhaira’s rivalry and starts concerning Vara, now an adult and the uneasy bearer of his father’s legacy. This back half of the movie occasionally capitalizes on its initial promise, especially whenever the relatively timid Vara tries to fill his dad’s mega-sized shoes. That struggle sets up a rather obvious twist, which then corkscrews into a more novel twist, ultimately laying the groundwork for the implicitly promised sequel. Sure, sure, but why aren’t there more fight scenes in the water? Couldn’t there have been punchier dialogue, and maybe some more dancing and less exposition?

These burning questions threaten to eclipse the most charming parts of “Devara: Part 1,” particularly supporting performances from diligent character actors like Sharma and Srikanth, as well as Kapoor’s scene-stealing turn as Thangam, Vara’s flirtatious love interest. A packed matinee screening in Times Square took a bathroom break during Thangam’s prescribed solo dance number; they missed the movie’s best musical number. My audience did not, however, forget to roar with applause whenever Rao performed a heroic flex or danced along to songs that they’d already committed to memory. Rao’s emotional range still isn’t vast, but he does unleash a devastating charm offensive whenever he fights (with great posture) or dances (with disarming exuberance). A few set pieces also feature a couple of stand-out images and effects, but only a few have enough momentum and flair to sustain their entire length.

So how badly do we need a “Devara: Part 2”? Siva rarely challenges his charming ensemble cast to step outside of their comfort zones, but he and his collaborators still deliver a lot of what you might want from an action-musical about a pack of murderous, but righteous pirates. A sequel could be a thrilling improvement on what this middling tentpole riser sets up. It could also sink beneath the heavy weight of viewers’ otherwise reasonable expectations.

As Ray Yeung’s “All Shall Be Well” opens, the gently moving camera both observes the affectionate routines of a Hong Kong lesbian couple in their 60s, Angie (Patra Au Ga Man) and Pat (Maggie Li Lin Lin), at the same time it seems to be caressing their life of four decades together like a precious fabric. They walk in the woods, enjoy time with their community of friends, shop the farmers market arm in arm and host big joyful meals with Pat’s extended clan, to whom they’re more than just out. “Aunty” Angie couldn’t be closer to the grown kids of Pat’s brother, Shing (Tai Bo), and his wife, Mei (Hui So Ying): She helped raise them when times for that family were tough.

There’s a big difference, though, between being family and, in the wake of a loss, remaining family. When Pat dies suddenly, a bereft Angie finds herself in a situation that puts her at odds with Shing’s family, whose handling of their grief begins to look a lot like callous discrimination. With patience and emotional intelligence, writer-director Yeung, whose handful of features (“Suk Suk,” “Front Cover”) shine a light on gay lives in Hong Kong, explores another quietly wrenching story of the types of battles for respect and acceptance that gay couples go through.

If one needs a practical takeaway from this ache of a movie, it’s this: Make things official. Almost immediately, there’s a disagreement over a burial that Angie has no legal standing over because she and Pat never married. Mei and Shing casually dismiss Angie’s insistence that Pat wanted to have her ashes scattered at sea, instead heeding the advice of their fortuneteller, arranging for a traditional ritual and internment in a columbarium. The heartbreaking rictus of hurt on Angie’s fallen face at the ceremony, only one of many across Patra’s moving performance, says it all: a combination of disillusionment at the separation she’s feeling from a family she thought she knew and shame for not being able to honor the wishes of her loved one.

Things worsen when Angie learns Pat didn’t make a will, sparking an estate battle for the apartment that was in Pat’s name, which could evict Angie from the home she and her life partner made. Complicating the scenario is the financial hardship of Mei’s and Shing’s family: Their son Victor (Leung Chung Hang) wants to start a family with his girlfriend, while daughter Fanny (an excellent Fish Liew Chi Yu), aggrieved by circumstance, wants something bigger than the cramped space she shares with her two kids and a husband she barely tolerates. That neither of the kids’ romantic relationships (much less their parents’) are as strong as their Aunty’s was with Pat makes the message being sent even colder, as if the economic gain from an oversight naturally trumps doing right by a lasting bond.

As “All Shall Be Well” unfolds, Yeung lets on that he has no use for broad villain strokes, with the performances of Tai Bo and Hui — pinched and distracted — helping establish the sad reality that grief mixed with need doesn’t always concede space for people to feel charitable. The narrative is just understated enough to also let us see that Angie isn’t only fighting people she’s known intimately for years, but an unequal society that allows the increasingly impossible dream of homeownership to come between loved ones.

Angie goes through a lot and with an admirable reserve of strength (you’ll never feel happier that a character has such great friends), but the worst part is how the whole experience leads her to question the very thing that she should be leaning on most: where Pat’s heart stood toward her. It’s a quietly shattering place “All Shall Be Well” goes to, in which a time of consoling devolves into petty matters of consolation.

A still from ‘Hitler’
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Vijay Antony is on a spree with his recent films. While his contemporaries rarely churn out a couple of releases each year, the music director-turned-actor starred in four films last year and his latest release Hitler marks his third outing of 2024. But given how almost all of them turned out to be underwhelming, it feels like he’s shooting for quantity over quality, and Hitler, unfortunately, is the latest addition to that list.

Hitler features a story as old as its eponymous dictator. It starts with the shot of a group of worker women (one of them, of course, is heavily pregnant) who, after a tiring day at work, are at the banks of a river crossing where a makeshift rope gets them from one side to another. Thanks to incessant rains, the water level is higher than normal and this recipe for disaster unsurprisingly ends in a… disaster.

The film quickly moves to Chennai where Selva (Vijay Antony) becomes roomie with Karukkavel (Redin Kinglsey) and just like any Indian film hero, falls in love at first sight with a woman he bumps into, quite literally. Concurrently, Deputy Commissioner Shakthi (Gautam Vasudev Menon) is working on a case that involves a murder spree with identical MO and they all link to the politician Rajavelu (Charanraj) who is constantly losing his black money to the killer. As expected, the two worlds collide and if you haven’t figured out how the rest of the film will pan out and who the killer is, you are probably new to the world of Indian cinema and Hitler might actually intrigue you.

Hitler, had it released a few decades ago, would have been the textbook example of a vigilante film. But now, it feels like a rehash of multiple cult classics many of us grew up watching and one of them is Gentlemanwhich, incidentally, also starred Charanraj. Sticking to a familiar template is the least of Hitler’s worries as it struggles with a lack of ingenuity. There are attempts to break the mould — like a red herring involving a character played by Vivek Prasanna — but they all fall flat and add almost no value to the painfully predictable plot.

On the upside, the film does a good job of incorporating its female lead into the narrative. Riya Suman plays Sara, Selva’s love interest. After the routine romance-establishing shots, the character is neatly assimilated into the core plot and Riya does a good job with it. Speaking of performances, Gautam looks and feels perfect as an honest supercop forced to work for a politician. Selva, on the other hand, seems to have been written as a mysterious character, whose style of interaction differs on the basis of who he is talking to. But whether it comes across convincingly is a different question; Vijay Antony overselling his overly zealous nature around his roommate is far from convincing.

A still from ‘Hitler’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Despite its political backdrop, Hitler never sinks its teeth into its core idea. While it’s lovely to see veteran actor Charanraj back in Tamil cinema after a long gap, he plays a one-dimensional politician who makes the most unintentionally funny decisions ever. When poll predictions aren’t in his favour, he believes bribing people might turn the tide and to escape from the election commission’s strict measures, he sends the black money via local train which gets swindled. If that’s not crazy enough, instead of realising the leaky boat idea, he does that again, twice (I wish I was kidding), to nab the robber only to end up losing crores.

The haphazardly-written Hitler lacks the gripping social narrative Dana’s directorial debut Padaiveeran had or the heart and emotional beats his Vaanam Kottattumoffered, though the story lends itself well to both attributes. Instead, what we get is a watered-down vigilante actioner that neither astounds nor entertains. The tyrant dictator Hitler might have made propaganda films to push his evil agenda, but this Hitler leaves us wishing it had some agenda we could salute.

Hitler is currently running in theatres

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Published – September 27, 2024 05:44 pm IST