Directed by: S.S. Rajamouli
Starring: N.T. Rama Rao Jr., Ram Charan, Alia Bhatt, Olivia Morris
Unrated, 187 minutes
If you can imagine Quentin Tarantino directing “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” or Michael Bay making “Braveheart,” then you may have some idea of the kind of movie “RRR” is. The new historical epic from Indian filmmaker S.S. Rajamouli (“Baahubali: The Beginning”) isn’t a difficult movie to understand, but coming from India’s Telugu film industry (known as Tollywood), it’s a film for which American viewers may not have many points of reference. Even the aforementioned films, which help describe the elaborate fight choreography and blood-soaked thrills of “RRR” (short for “Rise, Roar, Revolt”), don’t capture the movie’s sweeping breadth of spectacles. Here is a saga of revolutionaries that makes room for musical numbers and a dance-off; here is a buddy movie with all the intense emotion and rent garments of Greek tragedy or Italian opera.
Perhaps it would be easier to describe what this movie isn’t. For starters, it isn’t short—the title finally appears on screen at the 40-minute mark—but it doesn’t feel like a marathon either. Sequence after sequence, scene after scene, “RRR” barrels ahead like a steam engine on fire, never losing an ounce of its momentum. It’s also lacking, notably, in subtleties of any kind. From its bright saturated colors to its emphatically theatrical performances to its perfunctory dialogue, “RRR” relieves the viewer of much of the burden of contemplation. Rajamouli wants you to sit back, relax, and let the show wash over you.
A heavy fictionalization of the lives of two Indian revolutionaries of the early 20th century, Rama Raju and Komaram Bheem, the film imagines a world in which these two men joined forces and brought the British Empire to its knees. Rajamouli endows his heroes with superhuman strength, lending the film an air of mythology; Rama (Ram Charan, “Magadheera”) single-handedly subdues an entire rioting mob, while Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr., “Nannaku Prematho”) outruns and overpowers a full-grown tiger. In an astounding jailbreak scene, Rama rides on Bheem’s shoulders, fending off their pursuers with two long guns while Bheem’s legs carry them swiftly away to safety. Like two characters from an old epic poem, hyperbolized more and more with each recitation, Rama and Bheem take on the stature of demigods.
The effect is often mesmerizing. Rajamouli’s vivid imagination gives us a bevy of memorable moments, from the garden party ruined by a truckload of carnivorous beasts to Rama’s harrowing flashbacks to the massacre that galvanized his ambitions. When there’s no physical way out of a sticky situation, our heroes break into song, as when Bheem, taking a brutal series of lashes all over his body, spurs the crowd around him to revolt by singing of his Indian pride. The film has its imperfections, awkward cuts and absurd story beats and flatly drawn characters, but the forest is so big we never seem to look at the trees.
That’s not to say the film is always easy to digest. To say nothing of its gung-ho nationalism, American viewers may also find an uncomfortable connection between the film’s plot and our current, tense state of affairs. Because Rama and Bheem not only take their vengeance against British soldiers, but, as depicted in a central plot arc, they also procure weapons to distribute among civilians. Arriving for American viewers as we address issues of gun proliferation and political violence here at home, “RRR” feels almost glib in its depiction of good guys with guns, or maybe just naive.
But then, this is the same movie where a tiger pounces on Bheem’s shoulders only for him to lift the animal and throw it onto someone else. It’s just entertainment, isn’t it? If it’s over the top, then maybe it’s fine to chalk it up to melodramatic license. Perhaps “RRR” is the goofy provocation that Hollywood, with its obsession with serious message movies and gritty Batman reboots, has sorely needed. “RRR” imagines a world where every villain is perfectly evil and meets a cathartic demise, where the abundant spilling of blood can coexist alongside choreographed dances, where the act of killing is sometimes justified and requires no further review. It’s equal parts sunny escapism and populist screed, but never weighed down by its widespread ambitions. Few films succeed by trying to be all things to all people, but “RRR” makes a surprisingly compelling case for an optimistic brand of maximalism.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 6/24/22.