The Telugu film industry had no history of bringing out sequels. However, Chiranjeevi's latest film, 'Shankar Dada Zindabad' came as a sequel to his earlier movie 'Shankar Dada MBBS'. It may be mentioned here that both SDM and the SDZ are the remakes of popular Bollywood movies.
Though 'SDM' was directed by Jayant C Paranji, Chiranjeevi chose Prabhudeva for this movie and the latter proved that he could bring out a clean film with a Mega Star by making little changes to the original Bollywood movie to accommodate songs for Chiranjeevi, keeping his fan following and image in view.
Surprisingly the other technical crew were almost the same, but for the cinematographer Chota K Naidu. The basic reason for opting for the remake of this film is this. A message, which had to be sent across the people, should come through a celebrity.
Moreover, almost all the recent films of Chiranjeevi have one message or the other. So, the producers wanted to give a message to the audiences that Gandhigiri is always better than Dadagiri and hence the remake.
Shankar Dada (Chiranjeevi) is a local dada and ATM (Srikanth) is his assistant. Shankar loses his heart to Jahnavi (Karishma Kotak), a radio jockey, after listening to her sweet voice in an FM channel. Once, he gets an opportunity to meet her through a contest on Gandhi and his teachings.
With the help of some professors, Shankar manages to win the contest and meets her. Jahnavi invites him to Second Innings House where there are some old men to give a lecture on Gandhigiri. With no options left, Shankar goes to library and reads about Gandhi.
As he continues to study about Gandhi, Shankar gets hallucination of watching Bapu. It helps him in the other way in giving good messages to the society.
Shankar starts frequenting to Second Innings House to meet Jahnavi. Rajalingam (Sayaji Shinde) eyes that house, for the marriage of his daughter. Learning that Shankar's girlfriend Jahnavi is staying with those old men, Rajalingam plans a trip for Shankar along with Jahnavi and the old men and gets the building vacated by ATM.
Shankar tells Rajalingam to return that building and he starts using Gandhigiri instead of Dagagiri. But Rajalingam did not relent. In order to teach him a lesson, Shankar and the old men start staging Satyagraha. At one point, Shankar reveals to Jahnavi that he was not a professor and only a local dada. So Jahnavi hates him and leaves the place.
In the climax, when Rajalingam's daughter's marriage was about to be cancelled, Shankar enters the scene and tries to convince the bridegroom's father (Saratbabu). Though he refuses to accept the alliance, his son (Pawan Kalyan) tells his father that he would surely marry the girl, as he became a fan of Shankar through the FM programme. The film ends on a happy note with the union of Shankar and Jahnavi.
Chiranjeevi once again proved that he is an expert in comedy timing and did the role with fantastic ease.
Sayaji Shinde is good as a villain. Debutant heroine Karishma Katak looked beautiful, though she had not much scope to perform.
Srikanth had got yet another chance to work with Chiranjeevi and he had a lengthy role along with Chiranjeevi. Pawan Kalyan, Sada, Raviteja, Allu Arjun, Prabhudeva, Devisri Prasad gave a guest appearance in the movie.
Brahmanandam is adequate in a pandit's role. Dilip Prabhawalkar who played the role of Gandhi in the original Bollywood movie again played the same role in the Telugu version.
Music by Devisri Prasad is a big hit and there was a tremendous sale of audio. Chota K Naidu's cinematography did wonders and he was able to make Chiranjeevi quite younger with his excellent camera
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