‘Triple Riding’ Kannada movie review: A lacklustre entertainer aimed to appease Ganesh’s fans

Ganesh in a still from ‘Triple Riding’
| Photo Credit: Anand Audio

Riding triples on a two-wheeler is certainly against traffic rules, and people are aware of being caught by the traffic police for the same. In Triple Riding, directed by Mahesh Gowda, the title denotes the equation that the protagonist, played by Ganesh, shares with the three female leads of the film, Megha Shetty, Aditi Prabhudeva, and Rachana Inder. It’s quite a challenging ride, but a joyful one as well. How Ganesh manoeuvres this triple ride on a bumpy love story, without getting hurt, forms the crux of this film.

Triple Riding is a mix of comedy, a little bit of emotion, sentiment, and action. But for those who watched Arasu starring the late Puneeth Rajkumar or Ganesh’s 2017 film Mugulu Nage, Triple Riding has nothing new to offer. There is an overdose of comedy, and the story is just another take on love and heartbreak.

The story revolves around Ram (Ganesh), a golf player, a sports car dealer, and a teacher of martial arts and swimming, who guises himself as a doctor to help his love interest Rakshita (Aditi Prabhudeva), a girl from an affluent family. In the process, he gets involved with Dr Ramya (Megha Shetty), the daughter of a politician. Things turn awry, when he relieves Ramya from her politician father (Sharat Lohitashwa) and Rakshita from his father, a mining baron, and gets tightly entangled in a web of unforeseen problems. To get rid of all these unforeseen problems, Ram takes shelter in a tea estate of his advocate father’s (Achyut Kumar) friend (Rangayana Raghu) and gets caught in a new set of problems. How Ram untangles from the net, and whether he succeeds in winning his true love, forms the rest of the story.

The narration, which falls flat in the first half, retains the curiosity of the audience all thanks to a twist in the tale that arrives before the intermission. The second half moves at a snail’s pace, picking up momentum only in the last 15 minutes. An overdose of comedy plays spoilsport in the film, especially due to the scenes created for Sadhu Kokila, Ravishankar Gowda, and Kuri Prakash. Similarly, Mahesh forces action and song sequences unnecessarily in the narration to appeal to Ganesh’s stardom. There is no freshness in storytelling too. Many of Ganesh’s films have a tightly knitted love story that has an emotional quotient as well. And in many cases, the emotional beats have felt ineffective as well. This continues in Triple Riding too, with the director underutilising many of his characters.

Though the three leading females get an equal share on the screen, Mahesh fails to flesh out their characters well. Rachana Inder makes her mark in a small but meaningful role. Ganesh is at his natural best except at times when his dialogue delivery seems too plastic. When it comes to the technical aspects, the editor KM Prakash could have made the film crisper.

In the end, only the director Mahesh could be held responsible for how this film turned out to be. For how long will Kannada filmmakers keep narrating stories about a hero falling in love with many women and finally ending up with one of them? It is unfortunate that in the name of appeasing fans, filmmakers write scripts like these that offer the star nothing new to experiment with.

With Kannada cinema putting on a brave new face and even commercial potboilers getting national recognition, it is high time that filmmakers take a second look at such cliche screenplays that are written to suit the image of the star. Fans of Ganesh, however, will be happy with Triple Riding since this this their hero’s second film this year after Galipata 2.