Alludu Adhurs movie review: Santosh Srinivas' silly, outdated comedy is an assault to the senses

To describe Santosh Srinivas’ action-comedy, Alludu Adhurs as silly, outdated, and a nonsensical film isn’t enough. Words like these don’t convey the full picture because the film turns into a trainwreck long before it ends. You lose track of why you are laughing throughout the film. Are you laughing at the film or with the characters? Sometimes, you laugh because a bunch of actors, including the likes of Prakash Raj and Sonu Sood, have taken up this project. You wonder if they really read the script. How could they listen to a scene on the set and convince themselves to do it without thinking twice about it? On one hand, throughout the film, you try to convince yourself that the film doesn’t take itself seriously, so you shouldn’t either. The only choice, if you aren’t watching the film, is to hallucinate and imagine things that don’t exist to keep yourself entertained. Welcome on-board…this ship is sinking so deep that you’ll find things that don’t exist under the sun.

Moments into the story, we are told that Sai Srinivas (Bellamkonda Sai Sreenivas) has a confusing characterisation. He will do anything for people whom he loves. Soon, he falls in love with Kaumudi (Nabha Natesh), but her father Jayapal Reddy (Prakash Raj) is so upset with his antics that he vows to kill him. But Srinivas is too smart. He confuses everyone, including the viewers, but Jayapal Reddy challenges him to fight Gaja (Sonu Sood) first. If you managed to hang in there till this point in the film, writer and director Santosh Srinivas and his team turn the ship around and plunge it deep into the abyss of their imagination. What follows next is a test of your nerves. Each scene is more ludicrous than its previous one because someone thought this is what entertainment means. The sheer audacity of this movie lies in putting together a team and convincing them there’s a story when there’s none.

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[caption id=“attachment_9204401” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  A still from Alludu Adhurs[/caption]

In movies, generally, people crack jokes. But in Alludu Adhurs, jokes crack people’s minds. Every single character babbles so much that at some point you want to watch the film on mute mode, but then, you realise that you can’t pause anything. How does one even keep track of their train of thoughts if one keeps talking so much? Every line comes across as a tongue twister, and there’s logic behind every move which Srinivas pulls off. We are now deep into the slapstick comedy territory. It does feel familiar. You’ve seen such specimens in films like Ravi Teja’s Krishna, Ram’s Ready, Vishnu Manchu’s Dhee among many others. Alludu Adhurs belongs to a subgenre of films where the hero fools the villain in the latter’s house in order to marry the heroine. But what separates those films and this pile of trash is the route the hero takes to fool everyone. The comedy here revolves around a ghost, which is so terrible that it’s hard to believe that they actually shot the footage and included it in the final cut. This sort of buffoonery goes on forever and we are expected to laugh along with Sonu Sood and Sai Srinivas.

Every scene in Alludu Adhurs is a potential landmine that will explode anytime soon. In the lexicon of Telugu cinema, the word ‘killer’ is often used as a synonym for something that’s really good. Santosh Srinivas wants us to root for the ‘killer entertainment quotient’ in the film. But then, it’s this ‘Killer comedy’ track which is the true serial killer in the film. To be fair, Alludu Adhurs tries everything to make things work. It lets Sai Sreenivas flex his muscles, crack jokes to tickle your funny bone, make him dance even in the icy cold mountains in Kashmir. It even makes him enact Raghav Lawrence’s style from the Kanchana series, then shake a leg with Sonu Sood, and finally gives everyone a chance to extol the virtues of the hero. Santosh Srinivas might as well have asked the actors to recite the whole user manual of your phone, just for the heck of it. At least, the latter would have made some sense.

It’s exhausting, but then the film sets the right tone from the beginning. It knows that kind of film it wants to be and expects you to blindly follow it without thinking too much, because there’s no logic or reason. The more you think about the experience of watching this film, it resembles a deep sea exploration where you are likely to encounter animals which you have never seen before. The lack of sunlight and high pressure at that depth does strange things to your body and mind. Your mind goes blank. You begin to hallucinate about things that never existed. Alludu Adhurs takes you on that incredible journey and leaves you at that point of no return.