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Rowdy Boys Movie Review: DSP's catch-all music saves this generic, bland love story
What is surely awesome about the film is the music. Devi Sri Prasad comes out with a catch-all album and his many songs alone make the love story somewhat layered.
Title: Rowdy Boys
Cast: Ashish Reddy, Anupama Parameswaran and others
Director: Sree Harsha Konuganti
Run-Time: 142 minutes
Rating: 2.5/5
'Rowdy Boys' is one of the very few high-stakes college campus movies to have been made in a long time by Tollywood. Producer Dil Raju lets the director make the backdrop look expansive. Hyderabad is a city where several Engineering colleges are opulent. A whole generation of students has been fascinated by love affairs, memes, dating culture, parties, and campus skirmishes. The film under review makes an attempt at capturing the mindset of the Instagram generation to an extent. The campus fights are massive and cinematic. Beyond a point, the film turns out to be too generic.
Newcomer Ashish plays Akshay, who falls in love with a medical student named Kavya, played by Anupama Parameswaran. Kavya is not only older than Akshay in age but is also a brilliant student. The male lead's daredevil attitude (he flashes his masculinity at the drop of a hat in the initial days of college life) and defiant wooing impresses her. Sooner than later, she decides to date him.
Kavya's volatile classmate Vikram (Vikram Sahidev) is seething with rage in the meanwhile. Even the trailer had made it clear that Vikram sees Kavya as his property. It's up to Akshay and Kavya to stand up to the bully.
What could have been a nuanced, heart-touching rom-com turns out to be a pedestrian story in the second half. The backdrop offers a few high points (especially the title song, the vandalism portions, the street fights between the excitable students of two colleges). But the film slowly junks its strengths and resorts to familiar ideas. Akshay travels extempore and there is a meet-cute moment that is a throwback to Mani Ratnam's 'Sakhi'. The montage shots are designed to make the audience feel nostalgic about some beloved romances.
Years pass by but Akshay and Kavya don't seem to have developed the kind of easy intimacy that we saw between Arjun Reddy and Preethi in 'Arjun Reddy'. Even in the second half, in the initial portions, Akshay comes across as a reckless guy who does things without depth in his thinking.
The less said about the one-note and stale characterization of Vikram the better. He and his gang of terrible friends rush to all sorts of places with sticks in their hands and angry faces. Vikram should have been like the second lead man (not exactly but almost) in the first half, someone who doesn't make his meanness too obvious.
In an attempt to show Akshay as a youngster with a spirit of adventure, we are shown as if he believes his whole life depends on him defying Vikram's hegemony. It would have been a terrific idea had Akshay been a well-rounded individual who proudly takes a rap on the knuckles from his father (Srikanth Iyengar in a boring role).
What is surely awesome about the film is the music. Devi Sri Prasad comes out with a catch-all album and his many songs alone make the love story somewhat layered. You might want to listen to the jukebox, comprising of nine songs in total. Madhie's cinematography is luxuriant.
Watch the trailer of the film below:
