There is nothing remotely majestic about The Raja Saab, a mangled horror fantasy that borders awkwardly on the comedic and is frequently in danger of making a laughing stock of itself. Matters are aggravated manifold by the film's inordinate length, which only serves to take it further and further away from where it should have ended up.
Given the glaring gap between intention and execution, it would be easy to dismiss The Raja Saab - this reviewer watched the Hindi dub, replete with verbiage that reek of obsolescence - as a load of argle-bargle without any attenuating factors.
But hang on, the film does have something at the level of ideas that could have done with better, more meaningful exploration. But that never quite comes to pass.
It is the writing by Maruthi, who is also the director, does the film in. The script in unable to find a thread of logic sturdy enough to bind the wayward flights of fancy together. Barring the male protagonist, the characters who people the film pop in and out without much purpose.
Prabhas, lead actor and the raison d'etre of the film, is coming off the stupendous success of Salaar: Part 1 - Ceasefire (2023) and Kalki 2898 AD (2024). The Raja Saab is unlikely to make it a hattrick of smash hits for the star.
His fans might still find something to savour in massive misfire. But if you are looking for anything more than just swagger and a whole lot of swings and misses, this isn't where you will find it.
The clash in The Raja Saab is between a happy-go-lucky bachelor, Raju alias Raja Saab, who dotes on his dementia-afflicted grandmother Gangamma (Zarina Wahab), and a disembodied sorcerer (Sanjay Dutt), who guards a palace in a forest and traps anybody who dares to stray into its dark innards.
In a prelude that sets the stage for what lies ahead, a hospital ward boy with an urn wanders into the forest chasing a 500-rupee currency note. He finds himself stranded inside the dank palace. He is hounded by scary sights, shadows and spectres that are out to get him.
Cut to a town where a young girl is harassed by a hoodlum. It is time for the hero's entry scene. It is hard to believe that in the second quarter of the 21st century there still are screenwriters who think that a glib hunk in action mode is what a woman needs. The sequence is as out of sync with the times as it is outlandish.
Prabhas, flanked by three heroines (Niddhi Agerwal, Malavika Mohanan and Riddhi Kumar) on one side and a quartet of comic sidekicks who provide the surround sound on the other, is saddled with a storyline that is all over the place.
The Raja Saab is part a grandmother-grandson drama, part an evil spirit story and part pure drivel in which the titular character is pitted against an occult force that is too big for him to tame until a way out is inevitably found in the climax.
The plot pivots around a small-town man searching for a grandfather who went missing years ago, leaving his legally wedded wife in a permanent state of despair. The search takes the hero first to a big city and thence to a forest where a royal mansion holds many a secret and plenty of amassed wealth.
Our man Raju could do with all the money and it is all rightfully his own. It belongs to his grandfather. Trouble is that the old man, now dangling between the world of the living and the realms of the dead, will have none of it.
The evil apparition is all ash and soot that exudes menace, when it is not issuing direct threats to the hero and the group that has followed him into the haunted palace. Parts of the second half - all of it pans out in the ghostly abode - are supposed to be funny. It is, but for all the wrong reasons.
Prabhas tries hard, very hard indeed, to lift the film out of its morass but it is all akin to tilting at windmills. Flitting between two personas - invincible action hero and sociable young man - the actor stretches himself thin. The Raja Saab lacks the depth and range to make all the effort worthwhile.
As action star, Prabhas reduces bands of goons into cowering heaps of pulp. And as a romantic hero, he has a crisis of plenty. He is love with a postulant (Niddhi Agerwal), is friends with a rich man's daughter (Riddhi Kumar) who helps him out with money, and has another pretty woman (Malavika Mohanan) in his thrall.
One of the girls is given an action sequence of her own. The hero is suitable impressed. He looks on as the lady displays her wares. But at the end of it, the man has to step in to pull of a rescue act. Yes, the protagonist is surrounded by many women, but none of them is fleshed out well enough to be able to break out of the backdrop and take centre stage.
Late in the second half, Boman Irani surfaces from nowhere in the garb of a paranormal investigator who gives life-altering tips to Raju about the virtues of self-hypnosis. That, the psychiatrist intones, is the only way to outspook the spook on the prowl.
The shrink sends Raju into a trance. The hero finds himself on a seashore picking a pearl from an oyster. It turns into a lemon - and that becomes an unintentional metaphor for the film itself. Raju is trapped between reality and illusion. The villain hovers between flesh-and-blood existence and an ephemeral domain.
"Main kya karoon? Mera sar phata jaa raha hain (What do I do? I have a splitting headache)," the hero thunders when all the chaos unleashed by the diabolical conjurings of a wandering spirit begins to get the better of him. He is the hero. He finds a way out.
But what about the audience that has already spent two and a half hours struggling to make sense of the proceedings and is still nowhere near the end of the film? There are no palliatives in sight.
The Raja Saab, the tale of a good boy, a granny, a Gothic mansion, a ghost and three girls, is a royal mess. Only for Prabhas fans
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Prabhas, Nidhhi Agerwal, Malavika Mohanan, Riddhi Kumar, Zarina Wahab, Sanjay Dutt
