18, 20 Love Story Review

A love tale blooms between a poor boy and rich girl and as expected, the girl's father decides to get the boy and his family killed. He takes the help of a professional goonda and twist in tale occurs leaving the goon to help the lovers. How does this happen? Let us see..

Story

J V (vinod) is a successful businessman and believes in getting to the top. He does not hesitate to get people killed if he wants to and for this, his main henchman is Bullanna (sivaji) who takes money and is ready to do anything including murders. In this process, J V decides to get his daughter Rupini (rineel) married to rich alliances. However, Rupini falls in love with Manoj (manoj) who is the son of a Dhaba owner (Chinna). Soon, their affair is known at home and JV decides to see the end of Manoj. In comes Bullanna and thanks to his mother's (pragathi) intrusion, Manoj and his father escape. However, his mother realizes that it was Manoj's father who saved the life of Bullanna once. She gives her piece of mind to Bullanna and he changes. He decides to help Manoj and Rupini. Bullanna also gets a love angle in the form of the social worker Bharathi (shraddha). What happens after that forms the rest of the story.

Performances

Both Manoj and Rineel are quite new and their amateur presence is felt strongly. Vinod Kumar was not upto his standards, Chinna was alright, master Bharath gave some energy, MS Narayana provided some comedy, Shraddha Das was alright but her role did not have much scope for performance. Pragathi was apt in her role and Jhansi was overacting. The real show stealer was Sivaji and he carried the film through the second half in a very interesting manner. Full credit goes to his presence and performance.

Technical aspects

The script was written without much depth and so the screenplay also looked stale. The background score was okay and two songs were hummable. Cinematography failed to capture the locations and the emotions correctly. Editing could have been better. The dialogues were okay and sometimes they looked a bit hammed. Locations were okay and the costumes were neat. Art department did their bit with standard.

Director's portrayal

The director came out with an old fashioned love story and he could have done his job better if he had focused on the narrative aspect in a better way. Even the presentation part was not in sync with the scenes at times. Someone like Vinod Kumar could have been put to a better use but that did not happen, similarly, the spark of romance between the young pair was not etched well at all. It looked quite amateur.

Critic's view

The film survives solely due to the performance of Sivaji and he has proved that he is an actor of substance. The film's drawback lies in the lack of content and the first half had literally nothing in the story. This one is purely for the mass audience and though there were elements like mother sentiment, romance, preaching non violence, those were not conceptualized in a way that creates an impact to the audience. This might not meet the success mark.

Verdict

Nothing special except Sivaji's performance

Cast: Sivaji, Shraddha Das, Manoj, Rineel Routh, Chinna, Vinod Kumar, master Bharath, MS, Pragathi, Jhansi etc

CREDITS:

Banner: Silpi Creations

Music: Sri Murali

Cinematography: Sivakumar

Director: Radhakrishna

Producers: T Nageswar Rao, K Ramesh Babu

Release date: 22/05/2009