RRR

Cert 15

181 mins

BBFC advice: Contains strong bloody violence

A long-trusted Twitter pal insisted we should get around to RRR and we were jolly glad we did.

This is a sumptuous thriller, set during the English occupation of India with myriad colourful set pieces.

And, while its key characters are exaggerated and a couple of the relationships are rather unlikely, the excitement abounded from the start to the end.

But did it really need to be three hours long?

S. S. Rajamouli's movie stars Ram Charan as a soldier who seems dead set on defending the English and is unaffected by their worst accesses.

His tone is set when he single-handedly takes on a demonstration of thousands of people who are on the cusp of rioting.

He is then brought in to track down an agitator (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) who has come to the city to rescue a girl (Twinkle Sharma) who has been kidnapped by the English.

However, fate conspires to throw the two together as friends because they don't know their respective backgrounds.

Charan and Rao are great leads and are incredibly vigorous in their wonderfully choreographed battle scenes.

Meanwhile, they also dazzle during the vibrant song and dance set pieces in this ultra-ambitious movie.

For much of the film, we were on tenterhooks trying to work out why it appeared that the soldier was betraying his own people and what would happen if he were discovered.

On the minus side, the resolutions are too easy and one essential relationship between Rao's character and and English aristocrat (Olivia Morris) stretches the imagination and is bizarrely unchallenged.

Fans of Alia Bhatt and Ajay Devgn will be a tad disappointed because they only have cameos -

nevertheless, RRR is a rollocking entertainer and is, as predicted, worth watching.