Game Changer, produced by Dil Raju and Shirish, was released in theatres today. In this section, we are going to review the major Sankranthi release of the year.
Plot:
Ram Nandan (Ram Charan) is an honest, gutsy IAS officer who cracks down on the food mafia and other mafias as soon as he takes charge of the district. He then decides to take on Bobbili Mopidevi (SJ Suryah), the son of the CM Sathyamurthy (Srikanth). Meanwhile, an otherwise corrupt Sathyamurthy calls upon the entire administration to give up corruption and start working for development. There is a twist in the tale in the form of an unexpected video clip. Ram Nandan, his father Appanna (also played by Ram Charan) and Sathyamurthy share a past.
Performances:
Ram Charan single-handedly lifts a chunk of scenes. Even the many shoddily executed scenes are managed by his screen presence. He is excellent as Appanna, while Ram Nandan is watered down by a below-ordinary action choreography.
Kiara Advani's Deepika is an avoidable clause in a film that obsesses with Acts, GOs and Rules. SJ Suryah's commanding performance injects life into the otherwise braindead antagonist he reprises. Conventionally, the aged character essayed by Srikanth would have been played by a Nasser or a Murali Sharma. But Shankar wanted to be unpredictable. Anjali's performance must be good because she is a Raja Mata-type mother in distress. Our audience love it when heroines play distressed women. Naveen Chandra, Ajay Ghosh and a bunch of cameos are like a pile of files in the Collector's office.
Technical aspects:
The film was in the making for three and a half years but not even three and a half songs make any impact. Naa Naa Hyraanaa had to be done away with due to technical reasons (hard luck if you want to watch the film in the first weekend). DHOP is marred by intrusive VFX (like a lot of scenes). Jaragandi is lavish but the sets don't seem real.
Tirru's cinematography is sub-par; even the Mocobot shots fail to manifest the intended tension. The production design is like the work of a bureaucrat: all show and little durability.
Post-Mortem:
In Game Changer, existential political crises pan out like a college skit. A character has a dramatic change of heart. An IAS officer can pull off the impossible only and only because he has read the Goondas Act, the Disaster Management Act, the Representation of the People Act, and everything that the scripting department could glean from headlines. An incumbent Member of Parliament is one of the script writers of Game Changer; he shows how you lose despite polling the highest number of votes.
In the name of an unpredictable hero, no drastic event is explained. A recent political film that was in a believable territory is Mohanlal's Lucifer. Game Changer is diametrically opposite to that. Influential personalities threaten to wield their clout but they don't. Even the most powerful keep mum after a punchline is hurled at them.
Srikanth's character is powerless when he is the CM and acquires power, miraculously, after he is gone. We would want to tell you in detail how absurd it is, but saying so would be giving away spoilers. When a Tamil director decides to make a political drama, the depths to which IQ can plumb can be bottomless. Shankar's Oke Okkadu was saved by its timeless songs and fab performances; the writing was single-digit IQ trash even for those times.
Game Changer abides by the time-tested rule of commercial masala cinema: Write absurd scenes sans logic and get away with everything by injecting an emotional flashback. The flashback in Game Changer presents an outdated plot that is rounded off by boring murders. The only reason it works is because of Appanna's speech disorder.
The melodramatic touches are a bit less frustrating than the political eccentricities on display. SJ Suryah's character, a CM aspirant, behaves like a version of a Posani Krishna Murali character from a low-brow political potboiler. Literally nothing that he does, either out of arrogance or madness, either out of helplessness or desperation, would ever be done in real life even by a half-decent city Mayor.
The college episodes are blighted by dated ideas. Kiara Advani's character stops talking with her boyfriend for a silly reason (remember, this is a Telugu film literally but a Tamil film in spirit).
Closing Remarks:
Game Changer is a Tamil political film made with Telugu actors. If you are a movie buff, you would know this verdict is scathing enough. Nothing more needs to be said.
