Movie Review 'Mukunda': Rao Ramesh is the surprise element

Mukunda (Varun Tej) is a young and helpful person in a small town. The municipal chairman (Rao Ramesh) is a cruel politician and is in power for many years. One of Mukunda’s friends is in love with a girl related to the politician whose goons try to kill him. But he is saved by Mukunda.

Meanwhile, Mukunda challenges the politician and decides to bring him down from power. How he does that forms the crux of the story. Nagababu’s son Varun Tej’s debut film is director Srikanth Addala’s third film. While his earlier films were clean, family entertainers, this one has a bit of action, perhaps because he was directing a debutant from a big film family.

The director as usual has done a great job with the dialogues in the typical Godavari accent. This film’s subject also revolves around a small town, Bheemavaram, West Godavari district. If you can understand the accent, you will enjoy the humour. Varun Tej looks good and has also done a neat job. His character has been portrayed well. For a debutant, he acts quite well.

Varun doesn’t have many dialogues in the film and he is good in the action scenes. Pooja Hegde plays the female lead and she is quite glamorous. She too doesn’t have many dialogues but does her job perfectly. Interestingly, there are no dialogues between the lead couple, or expressions of love for that matter, but the chemistry between the two has been portrayed well.

The highlight of the film is definitely Rao Ramesh, who plays the politician. He is a revelation. The scenes between him and Varun Tej are impressive.

In the other characters Paruchuri Venkateswara Rao, Abhimanyu Singh and Nasser have done justice to their roles.

Prakash Raj has a cameo and Sekhar Kammula surprises everyone in the climax. Ali and Raghu Babu provided a few laughs. The cinematography is good and captures many beautiful locations. Micky J. Mayer provided soothing music and a couple of songs have turned up very nicely.

However, there is not much to the story and the director concentrates more on the action scenes. Also, Prakash Raj’s character has not been portrayed well. The songs are misplaced and come at the wrong time. Finally, it’s not a regular commercial film, a typical Srikanth Addala kind of film, without the double meaning dialogues and vulgarity.