Daaku Maharaaj

IDaaku Maharaaj is a new Telugu language movie directed by Bobby Kolli and it stars Balakrishna, Pragya Jaiswal, Shradha Srinath and Bobby Deol with a cameo appearance by Urvashi Rautela. This movie tracks well with Balakrishna template where he is introduced as nobody but has a flashback where was a savior of people and he unleashes that fierceness in the climax. No surprises there. This movie was as predictable as sunrise and sunset.

While there is nothing wrong with formulaic commercial mass movies, the way this particular movie is written is an insult to the audience. The makers planned a "high elevation" scene every 10 minutes where we see Balakrishna uttering a senseless "punch dialogue" to cater to the "masses" followed by equally senseless songs with disgusting lyrics disguised as "mass numbers" all the while aided by S. Thaman's raucous background score that he lifted from Anirudh's Jailer theme "Alapara" and Hans Zimmer's Dune desert bass. Fortunately, this movie was not as loud as his other recent works so that's a concession, I guess.

While the movie shows so many objectionable scenes, especially involving little girls and women, the audience have to come accept that these form the core of a "Balakrishna Template". This is an unfortunate development where the audience make this kind of low effort scrap a commercial success. I cringed a little every time Balakrishna spanks the female lead in the movie. If that is not enough, the director Bobby Kolli made a little girl, probably a 6 year old, spank the female lead for Balakrishna in the name of "mass". Not stopping there, the liberal use of double entendres which leave no room for imagination is low even for Balakrishna's standards. The screenplay leaves no element of surprise by providing you exactly what you'd expect to happen exactly at the time you'd expect to happen.

What felt fresh, again for a Balakrishna template, was the cinematography. They were more subdued than a typical Balakrishna movie. However, the color grading was all over the place. There are scenes where excessive grunge effect was applied turning blood into a black colored liquid, again, presumably, to appease to the masses I guess.

Bottomline: This movie was a low effort scrap that caters to very specific set of audience.