Rahul Desai
Bland and oversincere, the film about industrialist Srikanth Bolla feels bereft of curiosity and creativity. It’s difficult to be polite about movies that not only add nothing to remarkable real-life stories, they subtract the life out of these stories.
How does a film determined to normalize disability manage to condescend on its own viewers? Every other moment is staged for the protagonist to teach the ableist world a lesson; every other scene is a contest that must be won by Srikanth.
Some scenes bend over backward to accommodate the shortcut film-making. The wordplay is worse. Every other line tries to be a cutesy riff on blindness.
It’s like Hiranandani simply imitates the conflict of his series Scam 2003: The Telgi Story to manufacture some stakes out of thin air. You know it’s trouble when an exhausting film about an exceptional person dares you to judge it.
Srikanth wants to be treated as just another person (he even rejects a ‘special category’ award), but the film does the opposite. As a result, his naysayers are cruel in cartoon-villain ways.
The treatment is flat and simplistic, almost as if the film doesn’t trust its hero to be naturally inspiring. The writing is such that, ironically, the visuals are pointless: If you close your eyes and listen, every character is a human questionnaire.