Shadow Review

Behind the Movie Shadow: Director Meher Ramesh is known for lavish taking and Venkatesh is for versatile character selection. Combo of these two means a lot. So, let us see how far this 'Shadow' will haunt us?

In the Movie Shadow: Story begins with undercover Journalist Raghu Ram (Naga Babu) working for Don Nana Bhai (Aditya Pancholi) unravels Mafia secrets under the name of Operation Shadow. Due to backstabbing from near ones, he loses life leaving his wife (Geetha) and his children in grief. Raghu Ram's son Raja Ram grows with vengeance as Shadow (Venkatesh) to erase Nana Bhai and his team. On the other side, Police Officer Prathap (Srikanth) is also assigned the same duty to crack Nana. In the process, Shadow and Prathap leave to Malaysia. The hit list of Shadow is to eliminate Jiiva, Lala, CP, ACP Tyagi etc.

Then comes in Dr. Madhu Bala (Taapsee) and senior Psychologist, Post Mortem Specialist Donga Srinu (MS Narayana) to Bangkok. How Shadow used this team to catch Nana's links? How is Prathap's wife (Madhurima) related to Shadow? All these form a part of lengthy climax.

Values of the Movie Shadow: A powerful title like Shadow will make audience expect atleast bit of strong narrative from Meher Ramesh. Unfortunately, he is the same or say becoming worse from bad. Hollowness in storyline and a feeble screenplay are evident throughout the run-time making 'Shadow' a torrid movie watching experience for patrons. Dialogues penned by Meher himself lack in judgement. Presence of specialists like Kona Venkat and Gopimohan behind the screen did not help anything in the final output. SS Thaman swallowed my ear-drums with his bizarre drumbeats. Both in background and song compositions, he was miserable. As usual, Shyam K Naidu's cinematography caught the glorious locales of Malaysia with plenty of areal camera angles (which are actually unnecessary). Editor Marthand K Venkatesh might have left with no best footage other than this. Except feeling pity for Producer Paruchuri Shivaram Prasad, we can't do any thing.

As an actor, Venkatesh seems to have completely lost the judgement in selection of scripts and directors. Watching him in variety of get-ups in revenge taking process reminded me of Balakrishna in 'Srimannarayana.' Ofcourse, in comedy scenes like spoofing of 'Gabbar Singh' Antyakshari or calling MS as Thathayya, there was a slight relief. Tapsee has no business in this script except dancing in untimely placed songs. MS Narayana performed far below his natural standards on low quality dialogues and pathetically conceived scenes. Same do applies for Dharamavarapu, Uttej, Krishna Bhagawan, Srinivas Reddy and others. Naazar, Naga Babu, Geetha were okay while villain batch of Aditya Pancholi, Rahul Dev, Nagineedu, Rao Ramesh etc were cursing. Srikanth got a lengthy role and he was just okay. Madhurima is also similar.        

Out of the Movie Shadow: Basic complaint on Meher Ramesh from very debut film is  his desire towards lavish spending on unnecessary and incompetent episodes. In order to give false buildup for villains, do he need helicopter to introduce them every time. OMG...the locales used for canning of scenes on Aditya Pancholi, Rahul Dev and other Mafia members were stunning but with no depth in narration and character development, how will this grandeur help Meher?  

Entire first half, right from introduction of hero till the point of interval...nothing really worked positive. First few minutes of second half was easy to go with routine Kona, Gopi kind of word play doing the trick. Once Venky's real character is opened before his mother, rest is cliched. While writing department has done huge damage, spineless drama with uninvolved characters and a decomposed storyline further distressed.

Commercially, 'Shadow' might open for good collections due to summer vacation but how long this will stand in market is really doubtful.

Cinejosh Verdict of the Movie Shadow: Meher Ramesh Goes into Deep Darkness.

Cinejosh Rating: 2/5

                                                                                           Reviewed by Srivaas