‘Ramabanam’ movie review: Gopichand’s masala entertainer miserably fails to build on an intriguing story

Gopichand in a still from ‘Ramabanam’
| Photo Credit: SonyMusicSouth/YouTube

Yet another Friday and we have yet another film, leaving you craving for a good old masala entertainer that gets the formula right. In the case of director Sriwass’s Ramabanam, the most plaguing issue is in how poorly it packages the many elements — comedy, romance, action, punchlines, and a hero with inhuman abilities. It seems as if these were just items on a checklist rather than anything else and it’s even more disappointing because there’s a good story at the centre of it all. It’s about two brothers, Rajaram (the Telugu cinema staple Jagapathi Babu) and Vignesh (Gopichand), who operate on two extreme moral ends; they are both do-gooders but it’s the classic means-to-the-end moral dilemma that separates the two. Rajaram, a hotelier, walks in a straight line and believes in the justice system, but Vicky fights fire with fire (he’s the ‘Ramabanam’, the arrow that flew out of Lord Rama’s bow).

Writer Bhupati Raja’s screenplay sets up the dramatic story of these brothers quite well. We open to a flashback that shows how a teenage Vicky, after burning Rajaram’s arch-rival Paparao’s (Nasser) godown, runs away to Kolkata, vowing to come back only after making his brother feel proud. There, Vicky grows to become rich and influential thanks to the rags-to-rich scheme that Indian cinema loves to propose, the underworld of crime.

Vicky has his own problems in Kolkata, but for the story of Ramabanam to move forward, he needs to come back to Hyderabad and reunite with Rajaram and his family, and this is where things go awry for both him and the audience. Through a passable song with some shuddersome visuals, Vicky falls in love with a woman named Bhairavi (Dimple Hayathi). The song begins with Vicky, this stranger of a man, pursuing this woman, taking a sip out of her coffee without notice and whatnot, and ends with her ‘reminiscing’ these wonderful moments only to fall in love. Firstly, who is she? What does she do? Why does she like Vicky? Is she really that ignorant to fall for someone so infamous for his crimes? It seems like this is the wrong film to ask these questions. All you must know is that Bhairavi’s dad thinks that orphans, even if rich, don’t deserve to marry his daughter and when informed of Vicky’s family back home, asks him to return with his family.

This really is a buzzkill; for over 14 years, Vicky misses his family terribly but the reason for his homecoming is a hurried love track that also gets sidelined for the rest of the movie, only for occasional speed-breakers in the form of duet songs in foreign locations. The reunion scene isn’t really that effective and we never see these characters talk to each other about the lives they’ve led away from each other, something you’d expect from normal social beings. The story picks up when Paparao and his son-in-law GK come into the picture, and we see what Rajaram, who is now the Chairman of the Food Safety and Standards Authority, is up against. Vicky, without revealing his gangster identity to his family, needs to fight his new enemies.

Ramabanam, at least for its major portions, doesn’t suffer when it stays on the lane of its central plot about the two brothers, their war against their enemies, and the family drama; a few portions show hints of the good old commercial masala magic working. It’s only when it goes beyond does it fail abysmally. For everything organic in the script, something extra is added. For instance, there’s a well-choreographed action scene in which Vicky is likened to Lord Narasimha (classic!), but we also get an unnecessary flashback fight in Kolkata where he’s shown as Kali with ‘Aigiri Nandini’ playing in the background. Speaking of action sequences, a scene set in Rajaram’s house, where Vicky has to fight off a group of home invaders without making much noise, had a lot of potential to become a major highlight but it unfortunately doesn’t.

Comedy, despite featuring a boast of good comedians, is another matter of dread. Ramabanam is yet another queerphobic film that bats for heteronormativity and antagonises queers. Vennela Kishore appears as a feminine music teacher and the writing portrays them as a touchy creep that everyone needs to stay away from. At one point, comedian Ali tells this to another character: “Be careful around him because he’s an emasculate person and he doesn’t have male reproductive organs.” All of these exist on the pretext of “comedy.”

Towards the end, Ramabanam becomes quite messy. Even the central plot involving Rajaram and Vicky’s fight against Paparao and GK ends up with a whimper after some very predictable turn of events. The villains of this tale make the experience even more tedious, with their template dialogues and reactions. Even the drama between the two brothers takes the routine route; the whole moral dilemma that divided the two goes nowhere novel.

In the end, it irks when one imagines how good of a masala entertainer Ramabanam had the potential to become. Somewhere, you start buying into its many promises and you begin to look beyond all the artificiality, in hopes of something refreshing, something appealing to the fans of masala cinema, and Ramabanam never delivers it.

Ramabanam is currently running in theatres