Mark Reviews Movies: RRR

RRR, Variance Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 15, 2022

A standard compliment of some new Hollywood movie is that they don't make 'em like that anymore. There's a temptation to aim that sentiment toward RRR, writer/director S.S. Rajamouli's epic about a rescue mission during the colonial period of India. Just as that plot description doesn't do Rajamouli's screenplay any justice, though, neither would such a compliment. The truth is that Hollywood almost certainly never made a film quite like this one—at least not in the way that Rajamouli blends so many elements and modes, while somehow making so many disparate things feel completely cohesive.

At its best, this film is a joy—a grand historical epic, yes, but also one that treats its characters seriously, even as the story also presents them as the equivalents of real-life superheroes. In theory, none of this should work when mixed together, but Rajamouli creates a reality that belongs exclusively to this film. It's over-the-top but intentionally so, and those intentions matter. Also, "over-the-top" is kind of underselling the experience, so there's an undeniable novelty in witnessing something so spectacularly silly played seriously, while somehow coming across as both hilarious in its method and thoughtful in its purpose.

The story puts two freedom fighters from India's history together, even though there's no record of the two men meeting or reason to believe that they would have met at all. Historians might pooh-pooh such a notion, but how many biographical movies have played with the facts of a real person's life? If one is going to make a work of fiction revolving around a real-life person, why shouldn't that work proudly announce itself as and actually set out to be entirely fictional?

We receive a quick summary—relatively speaking, of course, since the film is a breezy three hours in length (The description isn't meant to be ironic)—of the story and the characters at the start. It's 1920, and in a small village in the forest, a British official and his wife visit with the locals. In a horrible incident of miscommunication, the wife "buys" a young girl from the village with a single coin (The residents believe the woman is simply offering a gratuity for the girl's singing talents).

Attempts to rescue the girl from her initial captivity are met with violence, leaving the village's "shepherd" Komaram Bheem (Jr. N.T.R.) to find the girl and save her. Disguised and staying with a family in Delhi, Bheem tries to come up with a plan to infiltrate the British governor's mansion, find the abducted child, and return her to her home.

Meanwhile, Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan Teja) is an officer in the Imperial Police, who volunteers to track down Bheem, with the promise of a promotion, before the wanted man can execute his plan. By the way, Raju is introduced as the "Fire" to Bheem's "Water" in introductory title cards, but more importantly, his real introduction comes at an outpost in the desert. Raju single-handedly navigates through and fights back against a near-rioting crowd surrounding the military base, just to arrest a single man who dared to throw a rock at a photograph of King George V.

That sequence is the first of the film's breathless action setpieces, which are staged by Rajamouli with absolutely no fear of seeming unrealistic or ridiculous—and rightly so. This is a story in which real-life heroes take on the qualities of superheroes. It's a world in which Bheem hunts for animals, using himself as bait to lure a wolf, which in turn lures a tiger, which he has to keep restrained in a net by the sheer power of his deltoids holding two ropes pulling at his arms. It's a story in which Raju, in his determined—to put it mildly—efforts to arrest that man, can erupt from a massive pile of protestors trying to hold him down and beat him or shove against a couple dozen men blocking his path.

There are other such sequences—a daring rescue that has the two leaping from and swinging beneath a bridge to save a boy surrounded by fire, a siege on the mansion where we finally learn why Bheem was trapping predators from the wild, a deliriously imaginative climactic battle that has one man riding on the other's shoulders. They are all huge in scope, unceasing in momentum, and daring in how far Rajamouli removes them from just about any semblance of realism.

Somehow, they work, just as some other dalliances with fantasy function within this approach (Of note are two musical sequences, one a boisterous battle of stamina against British aristocrats and another a man trying endure a public flogging, although the soundtrack also features a theme song that clearly makes these two characters and their imaginary friendship a thing of uncertain destiny). The whole point is to see these two men as legitimate legends. In the language of popular movies, that means to make them superheroes, to turn their foes into wholly cruel British colonialists played by Ray Stevenson and Alison Doody, and to transform their adventures the stuff of action scenes that will likely make Rajamouli's colleagues around the world jealous.

The rest of the plot is important, in that it gets us from one sequence to the next and really solidifies the bond between these men, but it does get in the way on occasion. That's especially true following the film's intermission (sorry, "interrrval"), which spends a bit too much time explaining the true nature of Raju's past and why he's a member of an oppressive police force. To criticize this film for doing anything too much feels like a mistake, since the primary goal seems to be for this to be a lot of movie that does as much as possible. Then again, much of the film's success comes down to a matter of momentum, keeping us both engaged in the exaggeration and distracted from giving it too much thought, so any slowing down or pausing is also exaggerated.

Who really cares, though? RRR is a bold and brave exercise in excess. It's a larger-than-life tale that's as big as it needs to be for the film to make its point about the nature and wonder of legends.

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