Disco Raja(Telugu)
Starring Ravi Teja, Payal Rajput
Directed by V I Anand
Rating: *(1 star)
Ravi Teja—may God bless his dead career—once was king. They called him Masala Maharaj. We all know what too much masala does to the meal. For some years now, Tejaa’s masala products have been giving his career serious indigestion.
After a spate of flops where he apparently tried to reinvent himself, (although in reality all he did was rehash his same old, stale and outdated swag) he now returns with the most desperate and preposterous of all efforts to revive his career.
Regrettably, Disco Raja is as dead as a corpse left out to languish in a morgue. Ravi Teja in the hands of director V I Anand comes up with what can loosely be described as science affliction, not to be mistaken for science fiction.
Teja plays a man revived from the dead by the miracles of science. But let me tell you, no miracle, scientific or theosophical, can revive Ravi Teja’s career. Not if he insists on doing such buffoonish bilge. Providing audiences with an overdose of himself—oh, I forgot to mention, there are two of Teja—is not going to help his career get back its mojo. The gimmicks, which earlier were amusing are here plainly annoying.
Teja’s attempts to update his image to keep with the competition from Vijay Deverkonda and Adivi Shesh are so lame, they only add to the feeling of a scam masquerading as cinema.
As expected the leading ladies have nothing to do except sing praises of their beloved, dashing, debonair, darling (etc etc etc ) hero. And speaking of singing, the songs by Thaman are just about the only power-points in a film that seems to have been written in a stage of deep sleep. Teja still dances like a meteor. If only he could hold the audience when not dancing.
Ravi Teja sleepwalks through a film that belongs to the 1980s but pretends to be masala for the millennials. For those who thought Ravi Teja’s career cannot fall any lower than Bengal Tiger, Raja The Great, Touch Chesi Chudu, Nela Ticket and Amar Akbar Anthony…here is the answer.