Adavi Kaachina Vennela Review

Count the number of times every other character in the movie, be it the ever-failing young man or the failed athelete who has had to be a honey trap working for a businessman, uses the idiom 'Adivi kachina vennela' at the drop of a hat.  As if the audience wouldn't be able to locate his title justification in all these iterations and reiterations, the film ends with a climax where Arvind Krishna loses the thing he has found with so much hard work, proving that the God-gifted faculty that he has is, for now, 'adivi kachina vennela'.  As if to put RGV to shame, the director promises Part-II where we hope the coveted thing, whose historicity dates back to the Cholas, will finally be the hero's.

The film is set in a village backdrop.  Take it for some village in Kadapa dist.  You have everyone living a degenerate life, and the writer introduces to us a disloyal wife without wasting much time.  The wife (played by Pooja Ramachandran of 'Swamy Ra Ra' fame) disappears from the story, only to give way to a deliberately suggestive lady (played by Meenakshi Dixit) in whose honey-trap the very focused yet jobless hero falls even before being inebriated (now that his frustrated father is out on a trip to holy towns).  You have one rich mining baron, named OMR (played by Vinod Kumar), wanting to use the special faculties of Arvind Krishna to locate prospective mineral-rich areas in Africa.  Arvind can locate areas with hidden treasures underground by merely moving his foot over the ground.  If everyone around him craves for money, he wants to find something that a gifted medical practitioner who lived in the Chola kingdom had prepared and buried it underground.

After Tanikella Bharani narrates the back story (this 2-minute narration is what is described by the makers as making the film a historical fantasy), Arvind Krishna, maintaining that serious expression, makes an entry.  The scene where his faculty is revealed is so business-as-usual that you wonder whether there are elements in store which are even more exciting.  Alas, the hero's story almost refuses to evolve from this point.  The writer comes up with Meenakshi Dixit's story, crafts a chemistry between them, cursorily touches upon the villainy of Vinod Kumar and Suresh Babu (playing a coach), and thanklessly moves on to a climax where the CG work leaves you dumbfounded.

Given the film's cost, it's good visually and technically.  Akki Viswanadha Reddy, the deubtante, shows imagination in getting the camera angles right.  He displays taste in extracting the right musical output; the songs and the RR are by two different musicians and one can see the contrast.  While the songs have a Telugu touch with Sirivennela Seetharama Sastry's excellent lyrics reflecting the emotions and inner turmoil of the characters.

Talking of the turmoil that the two main characters undergo, the same is not translated in to a dramatic screenplay.  The director prefers pithy but effective dialogues.  The dialogues are devoid of impurities and the language is authentic Telugu at many places.  However, the nativist aura too is allowed to be frittered away when the film turns urbane but the screenplay fails to excite when the film turns into a crime thriller.  The 'Bangaru baathu' moral is known to everyone and there was absolutely no need to narrate it!

The technical finesse and some flashes of intelligent writing meet an unglorious end with the storyline going for a toss.

The film would have helped itself had Arvind Krishna's story been given a thorough ending and had the heroine's story involving a crime angle been effectively narrated.

As for performances, all of them give their best output.  Meenakshi Dixit looks too fashion model for a story of this kind.  Arvind Krishna's voice turns imbecilic at places.

Verdict: Visually good, technically fine, but the writing could have been better.

Rating: 2.5/5