A common line one hears in conversations about Telugu films goes ‘ asalu , story enti ?’ (What’s the story?) Wish someone in the core team of Touch Chesi Chudu had asked that question, forcefully, while making the film. If someone had posed that question and it had fallen on sensible ears, we would have been spared of this tiring 146-minute saga of scenes randomly strung together.
Watching Touch Chesi Chudu is an energy-draining exercise. One doesn’t take Ravi Teja style of mass masalas too seriously and look for logic. So it wasn’t about a search for cerebral cinema. His previous outing Raja The Great got it right with a few hilarious portions, but this one is pointless. Not one scene lingers at the end of the noisy, yawn-inducing drawl.
There are many writing credits – story by Vakkantam Vamsi (really?), Deepak Raj for screenplay and Srinu Bosani for dialogues. Did the story and screenplay go through different hands or was the debut director (Vikram Sirikonda) unable to make up its mind if he wants to go all out in making a no-brainer comedy, or an action entertainer or a family film! Note the word family, for, this film and its hero Karthikeya (Ravi Teja) throw the word around liberally, until you’ve had enough.
In Karthikeya’s workplace (he’s some sort of an industrialist because there’s some sort of a factory. Don’t ask more), the walls are plastered with slogans about caring for your family. Someone walks in for a job and mentions that he will be living alone and will send money to his family in Vizag, and Karthikeya launches a full-fledged sermon about family, during which words like ‘obsession’ ‘compassion’ and others that one wouldn’t remember are thrown together.
This family-loving hero dotes on his two young sisters, father, mother and grandmother. The family wants him to get over a bitter past (featuring Seerat Kapoor) and see him get married. A pelli choopulu sequence follows featuring Pushpa (Rashi Khanna) and it shows that the hero is better off talking as little as he can. Pushpa shows some spine when she rejects him for being clumsy and silly. But in most mass masalas, the heroine has to fall in line anyway. So does Pushpa, even if Karthikeya’s idea of praising her is equating her to ‘Statue of Liberty’, because it is ‘world famous’. Yes, you read it right.
JAM8 band’s ‘Pushpa’ song has a catchy rhythm, but little else happens till the interval and even well after the interval. All along you wonder how this story were developed in discussion stages and how the team went about making the film? A commissioner of police (Murali Sharma tries to bring some dignity to the proceedings) knows Karthikeya’s past as a fearless and reckless police officer. Things don’t end until Karthikeya resurfaces as a cop to settle old scores. Intermittently, there’s scope for Vennela Kishore and Satyam Rajesh to bring in some humour. Freddy Daruwala is yet another addition to Mumbai import villains cast in listless characters.
Touch Chesi Chudu
Cast : Ravi Teja, Rashi Khanna, Seerat Kapoor
Direction : Vikram Sirikonda
Storyline : Not worth fretting over.
