Shehzada

AVPL i heard was a film that itself was very average but was elevated solely by Allu Arjun 's swaggy performance and terrific songs including my and everyone's favourite Butta Bola.

So when you decide to remake an average film , you need someone to elevate it to be a good entertaining watch. Sadly , Kartik is not any Allu Arjun. Kartik is charming no doubt but Allu Arjun possess charm and swag (something that in the early last decade Salman bhai possessed), and this swag Kartik doesn't posses to carry mass entertainer .

You can easily see he does the bulk of the heavy lifting in this film. He's smiling almost the whole film and trying to deliver dialogues in his Kartik aaryan style but the thing is, the dialogues are so ordinary (written by the same man who wrote the cringy dialogues of Brahmastra) that none of them impress or leave any impact on you, except maybe a few.

Because of such poor dialogues, comedy mostly is a miss. Because of such poor comedy , actors like Paresh Rawal or Rajpal Yadav (in a cameo shorter than the bidi Kartik smokes) who once used to make us go ROFL with their presence can't do anything in this film.

Actors like Ronit Roy are wasted yet again. Manisha Koirala is okayish but gets very little screen space. Kriti Sanon, ummmm, was she even there in the film? Idk man i forgot lol her role is so forgettable and turns out to be that typical souvenir kind of role .

Action and it's style is very much a miss. I have seen glimpses of AVPL mass action scenes and the swag with which Allu executed them won the hearts of fans. Kartik can't do action at all. Why do makers want to show him in this avatar is going over my head. His mass scenes are totally off. The climax action sequence in the metro hanger is so forgettable (i don't even know what the climax in AVPL was, must be better than this atleast).

Songs. Felt like an umbrella pierced into my heart (get it?). Forget Butta boma, that's out of reach, not even one song of Shehzada is one percent close to any song from AVPL. And all these ordinary tracks are coming from the magical composer Pritam. Hard to swallow truth. Remember last year how AR Rahman composed songs for a film like Heropanti 2 and all were flop. Even the character dheela rehash version is such a pain to the ears. They aren't paying tribute to Salman, they are paying tribute to remakes with this remake song from own Bollywood industry.

Some good parts are there though , especially in the emotional scenes in the 2nd half and this where Kartik genuinely shines. Women objectification , which is a norm in Telugu films and present even in AVPL has been removed here and that's very good.

Overall, this is the 3rd film i have seen from Rohit Dhawan and he again makes an average film. Even to some extent Dishoom was better . I know i shouldn't say this but often when you see Kartik trying to give dialogues in a swaggy way, i feel he's trying to imitate Varun Dhawan and i felt VD could have been a slightly better choice cuz he posses that swag that Kartik is not having.

Watch it on ott rather!