30th September 2003

So what is special about Chiranjeevi's Tagore?
If you haven't seen the Tamil original (Vijayakant's Ramana) you are going to like the movie. It has crisp screenplay, outstanding camera work, breathtaking locales and a great performance by Chiranjeevi. Look out for his action when he realizes that his wife and son are dead. No other actor in Tollywood could have done that so naturally.

The movie has no room for Shriya. But it is a Chiranjeevi movie and so it should have six songs. Hence Shriya in the movie. Her job is drop her jaw in awe, giggle, wear skimpy clothes and dance to the average tunes of Mani Sharma. By the way, Mani Sharma's score can best be described as mediocre. None of the songs impress though Chiranjeevi's dancing skills have elevated all of them to a likable status.

What sets Tagore apart from his recent movies like Indra is that Tagore has absolutely no boring moments. There is something happening always. And care has been taken not to have Chiranjeevi in each and every frame of the movie. This is a marked deviation from his earlier movies. There are instances in the movie where you don't see Chiranjeevi for five to ten minutes continuously. Quite unheard of (or unseen of) if you ask me. Chiranjeevi makes sure that story is given top priority.. not his role.

However I do have a suggestion here. Sack the fight master first. Chiranjeevi's fight have always been a pleasure to watch. They used to be quite good, natural and believable. But in this movie, we are treated with third class fighting sequences where the baddies come one by one to Chiranjeevi to get beaten black and blue. Pawan Kalyan! Can't you be the fight master for your brother?

To illustrate my point, let me draw a comparison between Ramana and Tagore. The scene is in the hospital where the protagonist faces the hospital chairman. The chairman is seated at one end of the room whereas our hero is at the other end. The chairman orders one of the buffoons to give the hero his peace of mind. So the buffoon goes to the hero and tries to hit him. Vijayakant in Ramana, stands up and hits the guy on his neck and the guy is floored. Simple but effective. Chiranjeevi however remains seated but just flicks his feet or does something like that. The buffoon is then thrown (computer aided aerobics at work) to the other end of the room. Probably it suits Chiranjeevi's "Unconquerable" image but frankly I will take Vijayakant's episode any day over Chiranjeevi's.

When you are watching a bad movie in which Hero and the other characters behave as if their IQ is hovering near 45, you don't feel cheated. But in a well made movie if you suddenly come across a situation where the hero, for no apparent reason, decides not to kill the supreme commander of the bad guys rightaway despite having him tied to a chair in the Hero's den, you cannot pardon the script writer. You just cannot. You have come across situations in the same movie where the bad guys get killed as soon as they are captured but the same treatment is not given to the supreme commander. Reason? Simple, the climax needs to be spanned over two reels. If the baddie gets killed so simply, the climax wouldn't be that big.

Ok. Let's not worry too much about such foolish acts by the hero. The script otherwise is nearly airtight. Definitely a big improvement for Chiranjeevi. His scripts are always mundane but are elevated just because of Chiranjeevi's awesome screen presence. This time, he has some cooperation from the script. The result is a real blockbuster. Tagore is perhaps his best commercial venture yet though I still maintain that nothing can beat his "Rudra Veena".

Lastly, the dialogues in the movie have a political flavor. Probably Chiranjeevi is trying to enter politics. However the lines do it into the screenplay. So you don't feel they are odd. Go and watch the movie now. It is well worth the 10 dollars or the seventy rupees. Word of caution to those who have seen Ramana. Tagore is a scene-to-scene, word-to-word, number-to-number remake of Ramana except for the climax.