Aaradugula Bullet Movie Review: The Richter scale is no more

Title: Aaradugula Bullet
Cast: Gopichand, Nayanthara, Prakash Raj and others 
Director: B Gopal
Rating: 1.5/5

In one of the early scenes of 'Aaradugula Bullet', Shiva (Gopichand) thunders that his raging hand can cause an earthquake to hit the villain's body. In the course of the grossly antiquated film, we hear him refer to the Richter scale in those basic action scenes where a mild tremor would rather prefer to die by suicide looking at Shiva's self-proclaimed knack to trigger an earthquake. Fight master Kanal Kannan has effectively made the Richter scale hang itself in shame. 

Shiva loves his family the way Jagadish loved his family in the recent 'Tuck Jagadish'. Mercifully, it's not a joint family and there is little melodrama. Shiva's father, played by Prakash Raj, is an assistant city planner in Vijayawada. If the dad of a Telugu cinema hero is a government officer, need we say what the villain would be doing to him? You must be imagining Prakash Raj say, 'Nenu santhakam pettanu', by now. In this film, you can almost predict even the name of the antagonist. He is Kasi (Abhimanyu Singh) and his rowdyism is a monopolistic enterprise in Vijayawada. 

Writer Vakkantham Vamsi stages the story in a way that suits B Gopal's archaic sensibilities. One respectable aspect is that the equations between the father and his son are a bit unpredictable, like in Vamsi's directorial debut 'Naa Peru Surya'. This inherent strength is frittered away before it's even half-realized.

Brahmanamdam gets to do some unseemly romance with Nayanthara (who likes the hero for conspiring to get her fired from her job so that she has time to, well, love him!) and it's as if she is over-compensating for humiliating him in 'Adhurs'. Late MS Narayana plays a womanizer who gets exposed in front of his wife in an unwatchable comedy scene. 

The film takes its sweet time to come back to the main plot, wherein a bipolar contest between the Vijayawada's biggest rowdy and the father-son duo takes the form of a time and tested template. Our cine heroes embarrass dreaded gangsters in plain public sight and show shock when the latter hit back at their family members. What else do they expect the gangsters to do? 

There was a time when, before VV Vinayak and Boyapati Srinu rendered him redundant, director B Gopal's films were known for electrifying action moments. There are flying SUVs in 'Aaradugula Bullet' but they are an insult to even sub-zero production values. The build-up shots are jerky as much as the half-baked elevation moments that couldn't be saved even by Mani Sharma's BGM. 

The ultimate insult that the film heaps on itself is this: it shows the hero resorting to shop-lifting firecrackers. After a point, we sympathize with the villain for being condemned to fight such a lousy hero. 

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Watch the trailer of the film below: