Beystiman
It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.
Connianatu
How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.
Teddie Blake
The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.
Billie Morin
This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows
nikhilbantunitd
It is the fabulous film which will make you sit on the edge of the seat while watching the film.The best screenplay ever in indian movies,not less than any hollywood thriller with heart touching emotion in the film.
vivekmudiraj
Sukumar is very wise. His ideals are quite different from others. How different it means is
.. the movie will be confused, if he makes the movie in a different mood. Should run along with him and should think alike him. The movies Arya, Jagadam, Arya 2, 100% Love
. are all in the same way. Sukumar made a habit of thinking in a different manner, very far from the general audience. That's his Positive aspect. But now that positive aspect proved to be Negative, with his latest movie "1". Frankly, the movie is very new and looks to be different.The Telugu audience has never seen such a different story previously and even Mahesh has never performed such a role earlier. But audience should be able to understand this new aspect. If it is like a sort of enigma, the movie tells us about the result. The Story is
Gautam (Mahesh Babu), a rock star. He rocks the audience with the musical world of his songs. He has some flash-back. Unfortunately, he doesn't know the past. But haunted. He makes illusion that someone is going to kill him. In that aspect, he kills someone and surrenders himself. But the strange thing is that what he thinks he had killed someone is also an illusion.Doctors confirm that he has some mental illness. In this confusion, he leaves for Goa. There he comes across his illusion ed chasing man(killdeer). Sameera (Kruti Sanan) who is a reporter follows Gautam. She tries to know about Gautam's past. In Goa also, attacks take place on Gautam. There he understands, who are attacking him and why they are attacking him. Gautamki has a flash back. Someone killed her father. Now , they are trying to kill him. Gautam , now has two main issues. Who are his parents? Who killed them? How he came to know about these things? Who said about that? All these should be watched on the silver screen.There is a lot of confusion in the story. You may not hold all of them immediately. So, we explained the story in this simple manner. This is a psychological thriller. Its an another angle of the Surya's movie Ghajini. Ghajini forgets once for every 15 minutes. Here Gautam, feels the reality as an illusion and illusion as a reality. The story runs on this theme. There are a lot of riddles in this story, which really confused the audience. In comparison to first half, second half is more confusing.It seems that Sukumar might have left his hold on the steering, in the confusion of driving the story. With this, the confusion still increased a lot. It is very funny, to see that nobody comes to the rescue , if a rock star runs and kills someone on the London roads. In a movie , we should not earn such logic, but for a intellectual like Sukumar, how it is possible to make a movie without such simple logic. The climax drama of the film,that took place between Nasser and Mahesh is still ridiculous. But, after all the Movie is about Mahesh, so anyway, audience will sit in the Theatre to see his Handsome face.This is really the Director's inefficiency. He is unable to understand how to utilize a Star like Mahesh. He should make movies with brilliance.But ,if a movie is made with so much brilliance, then it becomes a Kangali. As it is felt that the movie brings Sankranthi, two days before, now its great if it stays till Sankranthi.
akshaykatakam
Hearsay had it that the movie was a rehashed adaptation of the Bourne series. We can assure you it isn't. That said, that said the film seems like an earnest attempt to fashion a spy thriller (in which the protagonist is in search of his true identity) to the dictates of the mainstream Tollywood potboiler template. We'll try to take you through the process of how a filmmaker looking to adapt a Hollywood thriller in Telugu would have to do.Firstly, clichés of the Hollywood spy thriller genre would need to be tinkered with suitably, starting from the protagonist. Since the intelligence wing of India, RAW, doesn't quite have the same ring as the MI6 or FBI, having the hero play a spy could prove detrimental. Playing an undercover cop or investigative journalist is considered too passé these days. A rock star is considered to be the epitome of user cool these days (in Telugu cinema parlance at least), and needless to say offers numerous song possibilities and the excuse to dress up the hero in a multitude of looks. So rocker it is.Now adapting to the central conflict of the plot - stolen identity - would be a real challenge. It would be too old fashioned to have his loose his memory due to a head injury sustained in an accident. Having his memory erased by the villains would get too implausibly hi-tech for the plot. We also need something that can bring in some melodrama... like the loss of a loved one.Voila, Gautham is introduced awakening from a nightmare from his childhood where he's on the run, dodging bullets from goons. It is followed by a prophetic rock number that goes Who are you?...giving you a hint of the central theme of the film. The song ends in a spectacular chase sequence after which Gautam surrenders to the police, confessing to killing three people who murdered his parents. It is revealed, our man is suffering from a brain disorder resulting from a 25% shortfall in Grey matter in his brain! As a result he can't tell reality from hallucination, the doctor explains after proving that Gautam doesn't remember how his parents looked.Did he really have parents? Did the get killed? Is it all a creation of his bleeped up brain? The rest of the film is designed to answer these questions in a rather complicated way. There is a touch of sophistication in the way the screenplay plays out. The cinematography is very slick and creates an intense mood with dull color pallets.The acting by Mahesh Babu is pretty intense right though despite going overboard with the brooding act a few places. He wears a permanent frown right through the movie without as much as half a grin even when he proposes love. He seems to have worked on his dancing which should cheer his fans big time. Kriti Sanon looks pretty and well enough to justify her role. The rest of the cast is just filling the numbers and do what they are told.The writing is sharp right through albeit being not so whistle worthy. It packs quite a few smart one liners delving into the nature of truth, identity, pain etc. The music though comes as a dampener, as does the background score which seems too pretentious. The action sequences are very Hollywood inspired but fall well short of being breathtaking and end up looking cheesy.So the bottom line is simple. The Tollywood format of six songs, five fights and loads of entertainment and melodrama makes it impossible to respectably adapt racy Hollywood styled suspense thrillers.
nikhilgantapu
Gautam (Mahesh) is a rock star. He is prone to nightmares and constantly on guard against the men who killed his parents and want to finish him off. When Gautam sees one of the men in the audience of his show, he takes off initially in fear but then in pursuit and kills the guy. Gautam turns himself in to the police, clearly disturbed but aware he has done something wrong. He was chased by Sameera, apparently some kind of production staff on the show who is also a journalist and squally fan girl. She films the fatal encounter and reveals the truth about Gautam – he was hallucinating the whole thing. There was no other man, no fight and no stabbing. Gautam's back story finally emerges when he ingeniously tracks down Nasser who says he was a cab driver 20 years ago
And that sends them off to London and the high adrenalin second half of the film. And yet once again, nothing is as it seems.Mahesh is very good and his dramatic scenes really do have urgency, conveying Gautam's pain and frustration. The scenes where Gautam is hanging on by a thread, fighting his inner demons, are so well acted but often undermined by the direction. Mahesh can do a lot with silence and minimal histrionics but Sukumar lays on tricky visuals where he could have just let the performance breathe. There is zero chemistry with Kriti Sanon, and their romance was of the desultory inst-love variety, an obligatory element. A hero with integration disorder opens up a lot of possibilities for turning mass film tropes inside out. But there is little logic, and so much bad filmy medicine, that the mental illness almost becomes irrelevant. Gautam is a man who cannot trust anyone and is out for personal revenge. Now he learns he cannot trust himself. How had he functioned for the last 20 odd years if he was prone to such vivid and realistic delusions? Why had no one around him noticed anything odd given he had 'killed' before? There was no reason for him to be a rock star other than as a change of image for Mahesh, so why not have more fun with the new career? And it takes everyone farPeter Hein puts all the right elements into the action scenes but repetition and sluggish editing sap the energy. How could a chase involving jet skis, boats, a para sail and hydro jet packs be tedious? There are also some things that are glossed over (e.g escaping from an underwater car) where they either lacked budget or an idea of how to extricate the hero from his impending doom. Sukumar is trying for a psychological edge but replaying a shot of Kelly Dorjee throwing a can into a bin multiple times to show Gautam thinking of using the rubbish as physical evidence is just painful.The locations are used well, and the film looks beautiful. There are some really nice touches that add style and even humour. Mahesh's son Gautham appears as young Gautam (those ears! Instantly recognizable).The threat of Indian fans forming a mob is enough to get the police to rethink keeping Gautam in jail, but then everything else functions as though the Belfast police are identical to the Andhra police so what is the point of that cultural in-joke? It's all very disjointed and seems to have been written by committee. Oh but Nasser's flashback wig is a dizzy. I think it is the poorer cousin of The Wig from Shakti. And for the hardcore Mahesh fans, yes he does a shower scene so you will see naked upper back. The glimpses of princely elbow are now old hat so no need to mention there are approximately 437 of those throughout the film. I think our friend The Mahesh Fan would approve of the brainy specs. Oh you want proof?In a good psychological thriller once the twist is revealed the story should be enriched, and the viewer should be able to re- interpret scenes with their new knowledge. I think films like The Prestige and even Sixth Sense did that extremely well. Sukumar couldn't make his own mind up about the film he was making so ended up with an overly long muddle that wouldn't completely satisfy either full-on Mahesh fans or the psycho-drama audience.A schizophrenic film about schizophrenia. 3 stars (mostly for Mahesh).Apart from the scenes in Northern Ireland (which I have now forced my entire family to watch) I love when a frog hops away from the fight and the action sequence in the bathroom is fantastic. Peter Hein comes through again! Thankfully there is no annoying separate comedy track to detract from the thriller nature of the story and although the romance wasn't particularly well realized at least it did give a respite from all the brooding. Nenokkadine is a good attempt at a rather more psychological thriller and while parts of the story are familiar at times, overall I do like the way Sukumar thinks. I love his tendency to make his heroes somewhat damaged and their flaws make them more interesting.