It’s that sinking feeling which one last felt while watching Kevin Costner in the 1995 waterborne disaster Waterworld. Devara comes close. It has its redemptive points—the feral faceoffs between Saif Ali Khan and NTR—but make no mistake: we are staring at a fullblown catastrophe. Aimless adrift and anchorless, Devara is a high-altitude idea executed in an ocean-bottom despair. Director Koratala Siva has done some blockbusters with some of the biggest superstars of Telugu cinema. His earlier collaboration with NTR Junta Garage had some sass and humor.
Devara is dead serious about its infernal intentions. There is no room here for laughter. Everyone is either suffering or making others suffer. The only break from the tedium of traumatized travesties is Janhvi Kapoor whose hip-swinging elegance is in sharp contrast to the mood of glowering menace that clutches at the heart of this icy-cold fractured and fragmented excursion into a watery blunderland. That cold damp feeling of watching a watered-down wasteland doesn’t leave the narration even in its most upbeat gyrations,and there aren’t too many of those.
Still, it is not all a loss in Devara Part 1(I seriously doubt anyone would be holding his breath for Part 2 after suffering through Part 1). Technically this is a terrific showcase of talent with R. Rathnavelu’s cinematography sweeping across the roaring seawaves, capturing the fury of Nature with a poetic flourish otherwise denied to the endeavour.
The film is seriously epic in visual terms. But how long can we remain impressed by wave after wave of water works? The crux, and the redeeming factor, are the NTR-Saif combats. The action is absurdly riveting , almost animalistic in its fury. The stunts here are far better choreographed than they were in Animal or any other recent combative cruise. Both NTR and Saif are in their element, jousting with an intensity that make horses redundant.
I wish the plot was better written. The sound and fury dunked in oceans of water are seriously migraine-inducing.One could get pneumonia simply watching the watery wasteland . In the absence of a coherent and engrossing plot, Devara is a misfire, albeit a magnificent misfire.
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