Chirujallu

Moviemaking can be an art form, a business, and - when done real well - both. Chirujallu is strictly business. Get the lead pair of a recent romance blockbuster, put a formula storyline around them, hire some pros for the camerawork and the music, and roll it out. The calculation is simple: people want more of the pair, so give it to them. There.

Given that brief, Chirujallu is pretty much on track. So there's Vamsi (Tarun), a very cinematic hero who's good at pulling gags to win bets, enchanting crowds with his public speaking skills, singing, bashing up 6 armed and Big goons single-handedly, clearing the civils with an all India rank of 4, and also at looking good. And there is Radhika (Richa), daughter of a rich Dad (SPB) who's head of an industrial conglomerate. She's just a little perky, and our man, a Mr. Good, and she do not really care for each other. The first half is dedicated to how they fall in love. More or less okay, especially so if you like the pair.

Then some goons, with the help of the police, kidnap Vamsi, and have him dumped in a mental hospital. Disclosing who the goons are and why they do this will spoil whatever story there is here, but suffices to say that our man escapes, and reunites with his lady love after hajaar coincidences that happen only in Indian cinema, and that you've seen hajaar times and are hajaar sick of. Then Vamsi identifies who's hired the goons to kill him, and some melodrama follows. The moral of the tale is that love is the primary qualification needed to marry a woman, and not the bank balance. See, you're richer by a new truth.

There's nothing new in the tale that's visible to the naked eye. It's clearly made to exploit the demand for the pair that would have been created by Nuvve Kaavaali. And it has all the usual drawbacks of Telugu cinema - hero beating up more people in fistfights than James Bond ever did, dialogues dripping in melodrama (like Tarun lecturing a roadside drunkard about a mother's love in about 2,000 words and talking about the virtues of true love in about 5,000 in the climax), highly un-real-world-like climax et al.

Tarun is fine for an actor still at the starting stages of his career. Richa looks pretty, and while that's not all that she has to do in the film, needs to mature as an actress. These two hog the reels, so there's not much to say about the other performances. SPB is good as usual, while Brahmanandam in a special appearance is wasted. The soundtrack by Vandemataram Srinivas is decent, and two of the songs - the title song and one more called "Radhika Ravela" - are indeed fine. And so's the picturization of the songs.

Like we said, there's no creativity or art out here - it's just one of those return-on-investment films. If you're one who can stand any romance, yo.