RRR Review

Rajamouli's gift is that he plays every absurdity completely straight. A man arrives at a riot on a motorcycle, another on a horse, and the film cuts them into a single rescue built out of a burning bridge and a child suspended over a river, staged with a geometric clarity most action cinema has forgotten. The friendship between Bheem and Raju is the engine, and because the film establishes each man's mission before it establishes their bond, the inevitable betrayal carries actual weight.

Naatu Naatu is not a musical interlude but a duel, which is how this film thinks about everything. Ram Charan and N. T. Rama Rao Jr. commit to the melodrama without a trace of irony, and the picture would collapse instantly if either of them winked. The British villains are cartoons, and the politics are a nationalist simplification of two men whose real lives were considerably more complicated. What is undeniable is the craft of the set pieces and a scale of imagination that made the rest of the year's blockbusters look timid.