“RRR”: A hero (or two) shall rise
Rated PG-13.. 187 minutes. In theaters.
It’s not long in “RRR” before a tiger and a wolf collide midair during a brawl with one of the film’s two musclebound heroes. Scenes of glorious excess make the screen hum with energy in the latest feature from S.S. Rajamouli, the director of the “Baahubali” blockbusters.
Set in 1920s India before independence, “RRR” pairs two of the country’s biggest stars, N.T. Rama Rao Jr. (known as “Jr. NTR”) and Ram Charan, as superfriends from either side of a bloody colonial divide. A goofily gallant Jr. NTR plays Bheem, a warrior from the Gond tribe, while Charan smolders as Ram, a fearsome police officer who is underestimated by his white superiors. (The characters are inspired by two rebel heroes from the era, Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju.)
Bheem journeys to Delhi to rescue a Gond girl enslaved by the British governor and his wife, a couple of sadists. Ram has orders to identify and capture Bheem by going undercover with revolutionaries. Instead, the men unwittingly make fast friends when they save a child stranded on a river that’s on fire. (As one does.)
But their missions get inevitably entangled, and Rajamouli (who collaborated on the story with his screenwriter father, Vijayendra Prasad), stirs in an aw-shucks courtship between Bheem and the governor’s not-racist niece (Olivia Morris).
Rajamouli shoots the film’s action with hallucinogenic fervor, supercharging scenes with a shimmering brand of extended slow-motion and CGI that feels less “generated” than unleashed. Here-to-there plot filler in “RRR” is instantly forgiven with each wild setpiece: Ram furiously tunneling through a 100strong mob outside his garrison, or the rumbling dance-off (the “Naatu Naatu” musical number) where Bheem and Ram giddily exhaust the British cads and delight the ladies.
The rousing anti-colonialist battle royal concludes with one final fistpump: an end-credit song celebrating political figures from across India.