Dilruba, produced by Vikram Mehra, Siddharth Anand Kumar, Ravi, Jojo Jose, Rakesh Reddy, was released in theatres on Holi. In this section, we are going to review the latest BO release.
Plot:
Siddhu (Kiran Abbavaram) is reluctant to accept the love proposal of his classmate Anjali (Rukshar Dhillon) because of his past. When his ex Maggie (Kathy Davison) flies back to India after her marriage to an NRI, she has more than a wound to heal. Siddhu has complicated his life by rubbing a gangster on the wrong side. What is more, Anjali could find him too difficult to handle.
Post-Mortem:
The thing with Dilruba is that there is too much 'Straight from a Dalda-heavy Dil' talk in the movie. And yet, there is little clarity. The conversations between Siddhu and his ex are, for want of a better word, unintentionally funny. Siddhu looks like he is implacable in one scene and comes across as a cute girlfriend-pleaser in another. When he doesn't get wooed or woo back, he insults his classmate (comedian Satya).
The villain's name is Joker but the real joke is the screenplay around him. He is a millionaire gangster whose henchmen develop cold feet in the face of a threat from villagers living hundreds of kilometers away. These villagers hold primitive weapons in their hands but the sophisticated drug cartel pisses in their pants in their presence. Siddhu runs into Joker at the exact moment of the day when his men are out to get his mother 100s of KMs away. John Vijay is the one who plays Joker, an eccentric Don whose over the top idiosyncrasies push the film into crime caper territory.
Director Viswa Karun's writing wants to be as Bohemian as a wannabe Puri Jagannadh hero but is as directionless as it can get. The track between Siddhu and Anjali has no real conversations. If they had real talk, they wouldn't probably have taken so long to figure out who they are. Anjali behaves like a rowdy girl on the college campus because she must indulge in reverse harassment. When the heroine is this way in our films, the male lead talks sparsely. And he must suddenly show his aggression by scaring her.
The film begins with broad statements like "Love is a never-ending chapter". Siddhu converses on his own poetic terms, the rules of which only he understands. For example, he says a post-incident Thank You is meaningless. You thank someone after receiving help, right? He says saying 'Sorry' to someone after the wrongdoing is meaningless. He should have said 'Sorry' to a pregnant woman much in advance for putting her in so much trouble.
The film's itch for philosophizing is never-ending. "He who never does anything wrong is a true hero", the hero says and goes on to pummel heads when a lifeless thing is destroyed. Even when he mouths obvious things like "Drugs are injurious to health", he wants us to believe that he went to the Puri Jagannadh College of Loud Philosophy. "Some relationships are planned while others are accidents," he declares. If you think about it, everyone and their aunts already know this.
Sam CS' music and Kiran Abbavaram's sincere performance are among the film's very few assets. Rukshar Dhillon holds out a promise, while John Vijay should have been asked to arrive on sets in a solemn state of mind.
Closing Remarks:
Dilruba suffers from a severe lack of clarity and direction, drowning in forced philosophical monologues and illogical plot contrivances.
