The thought that drives the movie Kuberaa, the latest bilingual starring Dhanush, directed by Sekhar Kammula, is quite simple. It is the societal divide between the rich and the poor and how the imbalance in the distribution of money is sort of making the poor poorer and the rich richer. Sekhar Kammula knows that designing the tiring and troublesome lives of the poor is essential for the movie to generate empathy in the minds of the audience. For that, he creates an elaborate plot that shows the intricate journey of our main character, Deva. Even though the placement of particular phrases is done to attain a certain kind of drama, the exhaustingly elaborate nature of the script, along with many broad-stroke patches, makes Kuberaa a tiring watch with no major impact.
A rich man who wants to become richer tries to influence the people in power when he hears about an opportunity that can make things greater for him for the next 15 years. But for that, he was asked to take care of the needs of these politically influential people through black money transactions. An expert advises the rich man on an easy way to get this done without having to get involved in them directly. What that advice was and how that plan goes is what we see in Kuberaa.
The challenge for the writing is to make the journey of the characters feel real for the audience, and that’s where the film falters. The basicness of the idea is not leaving that zone, and none of the beats in the story feel like they are adding layers or nuances to the story. The character played by Nagarjuna is an ex-CBI officer who had to pay the price for being an honest officer. But after that build-up, the way Sekhar Kammula makes that character compromise his ethics feels so silly on screen. There is a line in the movie, where Dhanush’s character Deva is compared to an Elephant, and the reason is that if anyone has done anything good to Deva, he will come back for them. It was actually a satisfying reasoning for a character trait that one can feel annoying. But the exaggerated story scenarios are actually reducing the charm of such writing tropes.
The idea here had the challenge of transforming from a seemingly silly and filmy concept to something that can touch our hearts. However, the nuances are getting lost because of the kind of events Sekhar Kammula opts for the story to advance. The way these negative characters talk feels very amateurish. There is a moment in the film where the big man’s ego is making him forget or let go of a huge amount of money. In the last half an hour or so of this movie, where two of the prominent characters are on the run for their lives, the situations they end up in are so unconvincing that you are simply sitting through the film rather than feeling it. In the second half of the movie, some of the exchanges between Deva and the leading lady, Sameera, made me think that it had a really solid possibility to be a love story with a quirky twist.
As the character Deva, Dhanush is able to maintain the innocence of the character on screen without necessarily making the character act like a kid with no world knowledge. He is not really becoming the action-star hero at any point in the film, and that really gives him a space to showcase his acting skills. For the character offered, Nagarjuna’s performance is adequate. The issue is with the writing of that character. Deepak is definitely empathetic. But the way the writing switches his nature according to the scenes almost makes that character look like a really fragile one. Rashmika Mandanna, as Sameera, is in that always-annoyed cute girl zone, and the role never felt like a challenge. Poor Jim Sarbh is always getting cast as these eccentric, megalomaniac characters, and the lack of nuances in the way these characters are written is actually an insult to his acting talent.
Kuberaa is an ambitious concept, and the screenplay has some dramatic plot points that actually make the idea worthy of a movie. But the fleshing-out process of the movie does not go after nuances, and because of the peripheral exploration that happens in the film around the idea of economic equality, the role reversal revenge tactics we see at the end of the film have no charm to its credit and the cinematic liberties they have taken in those sequences stick out like a sore thumb.
