The RajaSaab movie review: With a film like this, Prabhas needs to stop, seriously!

Neighbourhood girlies, at the sheer sight of him in shorts, exposing his legs, literally lose their mind. His village girlfriend — or it appears he’s friend-zoned her — can’t restrain her jealousy any longer. 

The camera, however, never tilts down to Prabhas’s legs — mainly to save audiences from an equal bout of extreme desire, I guess! 

Homo-erotica is complete. Given, I suppose, a fair portion of Prabhas’s picture-going public must be male. And for whom he’s already started off with a dance number with more extras than the population of Jubilee Hill. The camera’s fixated on Prabhas, obviously. 

Besides the woman in the village, he finds another (“angel nun”), who works at a church in the city, and instantly compares his appearance to Jesus Christ. 

Likewise, one more lassy lands at a restaurant to hand him a bag of cash, wholly hit by how he looks like a million bucks. He pays her attention in return. 

These three brainlessly besotted ladies needn’t be named. They’re thoroughly interchangeable in the film —  simply appearing, reappearing, without intention, or warning. 

No knock on Prabhas fans, who dub him the ‘Rebel Star’. Yet, to have an entire three-hour-plus movie, where everyone around the hero is as pointless as the ‘zero’ button of a ceiling fan, must mean a lotta pressure to deliver, when the point of it is basically hot air.

So, what exactly to make of this tall, dark, horse-like eponymous character, besides that Raja Saab wishes to be Rajnikanth? 

Frankly, I haven’t sought help from multiple sources to confirm what I saw. As I should have, since it’s impossible to piece this assault on the senses together. 

That said, let’s assume, for argument’s sake, there is The Raja Saab, as per the title, possibly born of immaculate conception, since we learn nothing about his parents — only that his grandmother (Zarina Wahab) is alive. 

She suffers from Alzheimer’s. She had a husband, who’s possibly gone missing, if not dead. The two oldies were royalty once. The hero goes in search of his grandpa, purportedly spotted in Hyderabad.

The larger purpose still is to essentially fill the screen up with visual effects — on occasion, of such low quality, that you could be in a cartoon film instead. Global benchmarks are too high, as it is. 

Much of the debilitatingly deliberate nonsense being passed off as big-canvas extravagance probably comes from the fact of the ‘pan India film’ having got into the filmmakers’ uneasy heads, that wear a crown, without a story tell, looking like such sad clowns, hence. 

Budgets fly at the same rate as the characters onscreen. It’s like they’ve shot sequences and figured, along the way, on the edit, where to fit them. 

And, no, I’m not just saying it for this one Prabhas pic — since the rare glory of SS Rajamouli’s Baahubali (2015, ’17) that shone a spotlight on Telugu cinema’s storytelling + technical brilliance. 

I groan equally under the weight of having survived Saaho (2019), Radhe Shyam (2022), Salaar (2023), thereafter. 

Unlike the aforementioned tentpoles, The Raja Saab’s supposed genre is horror comedy — that appears to work well with Hindi cinema audiences, although even the worst scenes from an already terrible Bhool Bhulaiyaa franchise should beat this hollowness hollower still.

The setting, therefore, switches to a haunted haveli that looks rather hotel-like for a palatial ruin. 

This is where those two ladies, simultaneously in love with Raja Saab, observe skin-care routine together, while one of them has just returned from performing a sexy song in a separate bedroom.  

I guess it takes imagination of another kind to line up horny scenes between heroines and the hero, while they’re stuck with a large group, in a doomed palace, with the spectre looming over their heads. 

These remain the most random romantic stuff in the history of onscreen lunacy!

What follows is further bullshit over ‘bhram’ (illusion/delusion), and reality, over a climax the size of a feature-length film. 

Which is when you wish to have stayed longer on the ‘item number’ with Prabhas and his three ladies, dancing to a remix of Bappi Lahiri’s Koi Yahan Nache Nache, from Disco Dancer (1982). Could totally hit the dance-floor with it.

Maybe with Sanjay Dutt on the console. He plays the ghost in this film. Which is fine. Here’s what gets my goat — he’s also the grandpa! 

Saying this as a Bollywood fan, you know what? Dutt, even at 66, must play anything, including the dada of the street, than Prabhas’s Dadaji! 

But then again, this is a joke. And the larger joke’s on my wilting brain, anyway. 

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