Gayapadda Simham movie review: Tharun Bhascker’s bold but messy film turns Donald Trump into Tollywood villain | Movie-review News

Direction and writing

Debutant director Kasyap Sreenivas takes on a lot: immigration satire, slapstick comedy, crime drama, and social commentary, all at once. The ambition is visible. So is the strain. The film tries to be many things and ends up being none of them with any real conviction. The first half shows flashes of what the film could have been if it had trusted a single lane and stuck to it.

Screenwriter Surya Prakash Jyosula brings in a comic-crime layer through a character called Brutal Dharma, a logistics man who is surprisingly squeamish about violence. It is an interesting addition that gives the second half something to work with, but the tonal shifts between comedy and crime never feel earned, they feel accidental.

When the immigration commentary starts to feel exhausting, the film pivots to occult subplots. The pivot is abrupt and unearned. It does not deepen anything; it simply replaces one half-formed idea with another.

Performances

Tharun Bhascker is the film’s biggest problem. He has always been better at restraint than at playing to the gallery, and this role asks him to do the latter. The comic timing is off, and the emotional beats land with a thud. There is even a scene in which his character calls Pelli Choopulu, the 2016 film Tharun himself directed and which won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Telugu, overrated. It reads as an attempt at self-aware humor, however, it does not work.

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JD Chakravarthy’s Brutal Dharma had the potential to be the film’s standout element. He is an actor who knows how to hold a frame, and the character is written with some color. But the execution lets him down. He is left with little to do once the plot shifts gears.

Sree Vishnu’s cameo is more than that. His character carries real weight in the narrative and he makes the most of the screen time he gets. Maanasa Choudhary plays the romantic interest without much to work with. Faria Abdullah and Subhalekha Sudhakar are handed a KGF-styled subplot that generates more noise than laughs. Both performers deserved considerably more, given their potential to stand out when Tharun Bascker is in the scene.

Spoof comedy only works when the spoof is a sharp comment on the original, or when the gap between what is being imitated and the context it is dropped into generates real friction. Here, all the references exist for recognition alone. The audience is expected to laugh simply because they know where the joke comes from, or just because of how it pans in the situation. None of the crew realises that it gains zero laughs and the nostalgia thins fast. In a film that is already struggling to find its comic voice, these sequences make the problem worse by eating up screen time that could have gone toward developing characters who actually matter to the story. For a movie that makes jokes on linear storytelling, it sure messes up.

Gayapadda Simham had the raw material for something genuinely memorable and funny. The idea of turning Trump’s deportation policy into the villain of a Telugu summer entertainer is not something you see every day, and the love-story-meets-immigration-crisis setup has clever comical timing on paper. But a debut director pulling too hard in too many directions, a lead performance that never finds his value, a script that abandons its best ideas halfway through, and spoof comedy that mistakes familiarity for wit add up to a film that is more frustrating than it is bad. You keep waiting for it to become what it nearly is.

Gayapadda Simham movie cast: Tharun Bhascker, J. D. Chakravarthy, Faria Abdullah, Maanasa Choudhary, Vishnu Oi, Subhalekha Sudhakar
Gayapadda Simham movie director: Kashyap Srinivas
Gayapadda Simham movie rating: One star