Review of  Hit -3 - The Third Case – Unnatural acting by `Natural Star Nani’

     (Telugu movies released in 4 more languages)

The third movie in the much-acclaimed Hit franchise – HIT-3 turned out to be an average and disappointing affair.   Hit-1 had Vishwak Sen which was a huge hit and remade in Hindi and Hit-2 (by far the best in this series) featured Adavi Seshu, and Hit-3 has a more popular and established star Nani.  Both Hit-1 and Hit-2 had lot of twists and turns and edge-of-the-seat thrills and surprise elements.   But sadly, Hit-3 has none of them, probably having a second rung super star Nani has compelled the director to compromise and not focus on the story and narrative and cater to the growing star status of Nani and its demand.

Hit-3 begins well with the hero, ACP Arjun Sarkaar (not sure why a Telugu character has a Bengali name) himself committing gruesome murders by hanging victims upside down and slashing their throats and enjoying video filming, coolly listening to the Pravachan of Chagati Koteswara Rao Garu (his audio discourses are effectively used at many places in the movie).   After committing the murder, he comes with his team to the crime scene, analyses and appreciates the murderer for being smart and doing a precision job without leaving any traces.    His character of being moody, short-tempered and a cop who uses foul language (holding choicest curse words halfway) has been well built and Nani did well in that part of the movie.   The side story of his funny banter with his father, who enjoys pestering him to get married and not waste time pressing buttons on the laptop, was enjoyable though very brief.    

The movie takes an interesting turn when gruesome murders take place in different cities in different states in a similar fashion and our ACP sets out to investigate every such murder without ever bothering about jurisdictions among different states.  So we are taken on an India trip from Telangana to Rajasthan, Jammu & Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh and a few more states.    While in Jammu, the Dirty Harry type of investigation by ACP Sarkar leads to communal issues with local Muslims holding wild protests against Sarkar.   The movie is tolerable till the interval with our guessing why the hero commits such gruesome murders, does he have a past and psychological issues and many more things.   At the interval bang a small twist is given by revealing that there a all India gang operating which through dark web enrols psycho killers in their group and the criterion for enrolment is committing minimum two gruesome murders film them and upload on to the sight to get admission and our ACP does murders to get admission to bust the gang and that act also is justified by an appropriate Pravachan by Changati

 More than what we predicted the movie to be a routine affair post-interval, the movie takes a free fall post-interval.   The writer-director completely lost steam, and the plot and what we see post-interval is a copy, cut-and-paste job from many Indian and Hollywood movies.   The action moves to the thick jungles of Arunachal Pradesh, where all the psycho killers are invited for an all-India get-together and our hero also makes his way to it.   After an uninspiring intro of the purpose of the get together in a very poorly designed den (looks like something from 1970s movies), the movie looks like what we have seen in a dozen of martial arts movies like Enter the Dragon, Bloodsport, some 50 years back.    The covert night operation done by hero there looks to have been lifted straight away from what Bruce Lee did in Enter the Dragon.   First without any reason, the Gang leader asks the participants to fight it out till only one of them survives.    The idiotic team trailing our Hero, losing their way and identifying three possible locations and raiding them to come back empty handed all look so ridiculous.  

The worst is reserved for the climax.    Going by the present trends of Pushpa2 and Marco, the climax is a prolonged 25-minute massacre of over 100 goons single-handedly by our superhero, Sarkaar, all with knives, swords and axes.   I wonder why our suited booted heroes all of a suddenly become Gladiators in the climax scenes and use such primitive methods of combat.    I could not find any logic that a hero like Nani, who has a big women and young fan following, should fall in the trap of extreme violence to the extent of getting `A” certificate for his movie for the first time.

Coming to acting, I always held and once again reiterate that action genre is not the cup of  Tea of Nani.   His diminutive personality, body language, weak voice, and murmuring type of dialogue delivery do not go well with action movies.  Nani has brought a fresh breath of air when he debuted in Telugu movies with movies like Pilla Zamindar (by far his best movie) followed it up with a noticeable cameo in Rajamouli’s Eega, and established himself as a bankable star with movies like Yavede Subramanyam, Nunnu Kori, Krishna Gadi Veera Prema Katha, Middle Class Abai and Jersey.    He is best suited for the role of the next-door boy, sober romance or comedy movies.   But from Gentleman onwards, the action hero bug and itch to experiment has started and he started dabbling in territories not best suited to him.    The success of movies like Dasara and Saripoda Sanivaram, attributable to his huge and dedicated fan base, has spoiled him and the fine and sensible actor (in movies like Jersey) with great comic timing is buried deep.   Other than Nani, Samuthikarini, as Nani's father, shines in a brief comic role and Srinidhi impressed in her very brief role.  

Story and direction are a big letdown down and BGM was excellent and saved the movie to some extent.    There are a couple of songs which do not get registered.   The stunt director was good at using good camera angles and camera work to cover up the limitation of our lanky hero pulling Prabhas-level action scenes.  

Extremely disappointing coming as a third instalment in Hit series.   The only interesting thing in the climax is the introduction of the hero of the Fourth series, Karti (with a funny-sounding name) ACP Virappa.   We can expect some comic relief from Karti.

This movie is not a movie fit to be released on a pan-India basis.  My recommendation -  avoid disappointment unless you are a die-hard fan of Nani and

compelled to support him.

S. Prabhakar

4.5.2025

 

 

 

 

 

     

 

 

Review of L2 (Empuraan) – (available in 5 languages on jio hotstar)

The Mohan Lal produced and acted movie Empuraan  touted as the costliest Malayalam movie launched on an ambitious scale, is full of grandeur, gloss and execution. After all these years at last Malayalam industry, known for its realistic and content driven movies, has bitten the bullet and joined the bandwagon of other southern industry namely Telugu, Tamil and Kannada in making meaningless mass masala commercial movies.   It has came close on heels of Marco which received lot of flak for its meaningless and extreme violence.   Like a Rajni, Chiranjeevi or Prabhas movies the director has gone for more elevation shots and put more focus in presenting larger than life image of Mohanlal and, giving credit where it is due, he succeeded to a great extent, right from the never seen before intro scene where Mohanlal alights from a huge aircraft in a Hollywood style.

The strongest aspects of the movie are its rich visual appeal, large-scale action sequences specially the action scenes in the Church and forest, and Mohanlal’s transformation from simple family man image in Drishyam series to Action image.   The best thing gifted actor director Pridhviraj Sukumar has done is, unlike many Indian movies including RRR, the foreign characters/actors are not Indianised and not made them to speak indianised English or broken Hindi/regional language.  All the foreigner characters in the movie so wonderfully acted by foreign actors, have retained their accent, body language acting style as if they are acting in a Hollywood movie.   But unfortunately like many other characters all these foreign characters are under developed to such an extent that you will wonder why they were there in the first place and narrative would have moved even without them. One really wishes they were given more screen time.   When the story goes back to Kerala politics and gets linked to first part Lucifer the movies lost its tempo.    As per me Prithviraj should have gone for an out and out action movie in lines of MI having spent so much in shooting various countries in stunning locations, hiring so many foreign actors and technicians, lavishly mounted action scenes rather than carrying the hangover of Lucifer which didn’t serve any purpose.  

The producer and director have unnecessarily created an avoidable controversy by making references to the Godhra incident, the Gujarat riots, the violent massacre of Muslims by villain named as “Baba Bajrangi”.   As expected, this was not taken as coincidence or not as an act without malafide intensions, and there was a back lash from certain quarters but the fire was quickly doused by Mohanlal apologising and assuring deleting of controversial scenes immediately after release of the movie.   Not sure whether the version available on the OTT is the toned down version or the original.   Whatever it may be that scene has no relevance to the movie and looked like an irrelevant patch work done for reasons best known to Mohanlal and Pridhviraj

Its an out and out Mohanlal movie and even at an advanced age, Mohanlal did not look out of place in action scenes and exhibited his own swag.   How I wish his swag and lavishly mounted elevation and action scenes are support by an excellent back ground music, some thing like what is done by Keeravani for Bahubali or DSP for Pushpa.   The insipid BGM has really pulled down many critical moments in the movie.

Its Mohalal all the way and he carried the movie on his shoulder single handedly, all foreign actors were excellent, Hindi actor Abhimanyu Singh, as villain has spit fire by effective use of his powerful eyes, Manju Warrior was good and did matured acting, director Prithiviraj had a very briefly role but he looked dashing in that and one wishes that he allotted more screen time for himself.    

The movie did not do earth shattering business on a PAN India level but made Rs. 350 crores the highest for a Malayalam movie.    But surely it is going to do for Malayalam Industry what KGF has done to Kannada Industry, pushing it to big league to compete with Telugu and Tamil movies.    Marco and Empuraan gives them the required confidence that Malayalam producers and directors like Priviraj can pull off an out and out mega budget action movies.   But in future whenever they make an action movie they will be better served if they shake off the hang over from movies like Lucifer and go for a stand alone action masala entertainer.   The four pronged race among four South Indian language movies to make mega budget movies will be interesting to watch in days to come.

Can watch if you are an action movies buff like me.

S. Prabhakar

3.5.25