Ramba Oorvasi Menaka, produced by Razesh Danda and Prasad Nimmakayala, was released in theatres today.
Plot:
While aspiring to become a cinema hero, Suri (Allari Naresh) accumulates a great deal of debts in his village, constantly making excuses to dodge his creditors. Meanwhile, his ailing mother's days are numbered, needing Rs 50 lakh for her surgery. His life takes a fantastical turn when he discovers the code to an ancestral, magic-laden book hidden in his home. Using the book's ancient spells, Suri summons the celestial nymphs Rambha, Urvashi, and Menaka down to Earth. Their earthly arrival triggers the wrath of Lord Indra (Vennela Kishore), who strips the apsaras of their divine powers. Suri is now in a fix. Not only are his wishes going to remain unfulfilled, but he has invited a new set of problems from his old rival Appal Naidu (Tarak Ponnappa).
Post-Mortem:
If you want to know what kind of a degraded civilization India has become, you should watch village-set Telugu movies. The Telugu rural cinema tropes are a sociological study in themselves. The male lead is a day-dreaming pleasure-seeker with no intention of working hard. One or more of his sidekicks/friends (VK Naresh and Srinivas Reddy in this case) is cheap. Women are objectified, and if it is a fantasy comedy, even celestial women are not spared. The glamour of cinema is the oxygen one or more characters lives on. Add a couple of lecherous men, a few middle-aged uncles who salivate at the prospect of watching porn or visiting a call girl, a heroine who has no standards (in addition, she is sometimes over-the-top) and a coming-of-age angle that feels sudden and unearned, you have the portrait of an empty ritual that passes for comedy.
Suri is mired in debts in his pursuit of cinema dreams. His mother's biggest regret is that he has run his late dad's drama company to the ground. His only hope is the ancestral book that can literally bring Rama, Urvasi, and Menaka down to the Earth. The catch: this doesn't have Indra's endorsement. Suri, in a display of the mother of all superstitions, literally worships the three celestial beings. He could be worthless, but his claim to fame is that the village beauty, Chinni (Surbhi), has a soft corner for him.
Writer-director Chandra Mohan Chintada weds an outdated plot with Gen Z-friendly meme references. From Boyapati Srinu's 'Humne already caution kiya!' to Pawan Kalyan's OG monologue to Pushpa 2 and Coolie mentions, the film never tires of substituting storytelling with pop culture references. The mother-son sentiment element gets a melodramatic treatment.
When your premise is two decades old, you at least give a genre-level spin. This film could have been a fantasy drama with a buddy comedy spin. It could also have been a weighty dark comedy, for it involves a curse and some mysterious deaths. But then, the film is content with the bare minimum. Barring that one episode where three male characters have to overcome their lust, there is nothing thoughtful about this film. VK Naresh is the sole serious performer who outperforms himself.
Allari Naresh is demotivated; by now, he knows that he was never supposed to be doing a comedy. Tarak Ponnappa's cop character is too generic. Vennela Kishore's Indra is given to breaking into English phrases like "Let's begin the show!". Raashi Singh, Vishnu Priya Bhimeneni, and Prisha Singh, who play the titular characters, seem like they are participating in a Ravindra Bharati stage show.
Closing Remarks:
Ramba Oorvasi Menaka squanders a promising fantasy-comedy premise with dated writing, forced pop-culture references, second-rate humour, and flat performances. The film never rises above its tired village-comedy template or develops its supernatural potential.
