Darling film review - Telugu cinema Review - Prabhas & Kajal Agarwal

Story

Prabhas (Prabhas) has a childhood sweetheart named Nandini (Kajal Agarwal) and they are separated during their childhood. Nandini migrates to Swiss along with her father. Meanwhile Prabhas rejects love proposals from other girls as his heart belongs to Nandini. Prabhas gets a chance to meet Nandini for the first time after the separation during the reunion of their respective parents who have studied together. The rest of the story is all about how Prabhas wins the love of Nandini.

Artists Performance

Prabhas: Prabhas is growing as an entertaining actor with each new movie. His comedy timing is impressive in this movie. His costumes and styling deserves a mention. Since there is no strength in the story line of the movie, the director had to put lot of burden on Prabhas, who delivers with elegance and flair.

Others: Kajal Agarwal’s characterization in the first half of the movie is quite dumb and is passive in the second half. Shradda Das, who plays the character of a girl chasing the hero relentlessly, does a good job. Mukesh Rushi’s work is more like a special appearance as a villain. Prabhu is adequate as hero’s father. Ahuti Prasad doesn’t look natural in his role. MS Narayana, Sivannarayana and Srinivasa Reddy are ok. The kid who played the role of heroine’s kid brother is pretty good.

Technical departments

Story - screenplay - direction: Story of the movie is clichéd one. The difference between the director’s earlier movies and this one is the screenplay twist is given during the interval. Directing a screenplay based movie like this one is a tricky task. The entire Swiss episode holds the key to this screenplay. The actual story takes place only in the second half. Hence it becomes extremely important to make sure that the Swiss episode is well written. Unfortunately, the Swiss episode is dull resulting in the entire first half appear disengaged. Since the entire story takes place in the second half, the latter part appears more interesting than the first half. The concept of second half where the hero has to impress the heroine and her father despite of having another guy vying for his girl is a time-tested one as we had seen such situations in countless movies. Karunakaran, who is known for poetic thoughts, sensible humor and nice montages, leaves his strengths aside to make a movie that revolves around the characterization of hero. Hence the entire movie turned out to be a series of comedy episodes written around the hero.

Other departments: Dialogues written by Swamy are good in parts. Music by GV Prakash is average. The background score should have been better. Cinematography by Andrew is very good. He explored Swiss locales well. Action episodes by Peter Heins (mostly inspired by Korean Movies) are good though look forced in the movie. Editing is adequate. Visual effects in songs (3rd song and the snow effect in Hyderabad) are commendable.

Analysis: First half of the film is not interesting. Second half gets better. The movie is good towards the last half-an-hour. Karunakaran didn’t stick to his strengths and tried to make an entertainment oriented film with a hero-centric approach. The plus points of the movie are Prabhas and a few comedy episodes in the second half. On the flip side, the Swiss episode and lack of regard for story mars the movie. We go to Karunakaran movies to watch his kind of work, not the kind of work the routine commercial directors dish out! We have to wait and see how Darling fares at box office this summer.

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