Utter mayhem

In a blood bathed finale the protagonist asks the villain: just give me one valid reason, why I should let go of you and I would do so. Most appropriate sentiment echoed for the viewers too.

Deploringly aggressive and brazenly celebrative of violence, this is something that could make the Ku Klux Klan and Ivan the Terrible blush.

Where liberty becomes license, art a mere commercial pretence, human expression runs the risk of petering into a loud deluge of crass content. ‘Chandi’ is a pointer that we the collective are wrongly violent and violently wrong, needlessly tolerant causelessly virulent.

This abject surrender to over-the-hill drama and high voltage vendetta even within a remotely acceptable theory that cinema is but entertainment but none the less a social document is socially destructive.

To play on the respect for martyrs and then to play to the gallery echoes what Paulo Coelho had warned: Certain superstitions, however, absurd they may seem remain in the human imagination and are often used by the unscrupulous persons.

She can do better than the Khans and Khiladi Kumar; she can jump roof tops a shade quicker than Tiger Khan. If only she were around, Nirbhaya may never have happened.

Well, you know she is Lady Rajini on the prowl. Also sleaze is not beyond her. In fact, she is a compulsive dancer and can do a rural folk number with the same ease that she can do one for the dance floor.

With historic claims to genetic connect with revolutionary Alluri Seetharama Raju, our latest paradigm on women empowerment can be revolutionary, guerilla fighter, mythical Shakti, what can this cardboard cut out not be but a bore!! Our protagonist is unleashing the biography of some blood thirsty contemporary understanding of Mahishasura Mardhini who in the midst of her penchant for killings and costumes is also a bloody reformer. Killer. Reformer.

Compulsive dancer and this Revolver Rani is a shooter par excellence. She could well be a misplaced page from Ripleys.

This week is crass celebration of stated women power by exploiting her sleaze and based on an assumption that a ticket to a film is a certification in lunacy. Sanctimoniously self contradictory, it is a tiring rehash of formula story telling of how the bad are terribly bad and the efficient courageously awesome.

For over two hours, you are navigated within the precincts of a script that eschews anything fresh. Imaginative or enduring or remotely entertaining.

Poor Alluri Seetharama Raju must be turning in his grave. With SEZ taken in as the popular villain and the men in Khaki and Khadi lampooned with consummate ease, even as yawn the vice gets exaggerated and you wonder if the filmmaker has something designedly against you for conspiring something of this magnitude. To narrate the story is to give the story line credibility.

It is about this gal from the town and family of Alluri Seetharama Raju reiterating that hell knoweth no fury greater than a woman scorned. The one woman destruction mission with the help of her guru Sharath Kumar destroys all the evil doers.

To conclude I am forced to return to Paulo Coelho: We are living in an age in which everything is allowed and democracy is being devoured and destroyed by timeless freedom. This is far from the space of commercial entertainment.