A lot was expected from Pradeep Ranganathan’s fourth Telugu film. Not that the first three were anything to gloat over. But they projected its leading man as a modern-day Dhanush, the man of the masses whose heroism lies in the lack of it.
In debutant director Keerthiswaran’s Dude, Ranganathan plays Agan, a do-gooder, the Joker without the mask, if you will, with a streak of Devdas in him. Initially, we see Agan create comic chaos at his ex-girlfriend’s wedding. We are then told Agan is not a disruptor but an incorrigible fixer who makes a living by arranging surprise parties. Why are we not surprised.
Subsequently, Agan extends the fixer’s role in his soul mate Kural’s life. Agan loves Kural (Mamatha Baiju). But he doesn’t know it. We know. Agan doesn’t. If he had accepted the truth about his feelings towards Kural in the first place, instead of ranting inane lines like, “Only friendship, no feelings” we would have been spared the chaotic mess that follows.
Dude is insufferably bloated and self-important. It sells its lies about love and its protagonist’s narcissistic feelings as an exploration of contemporary relationships, but falls abysmally short on all counts.
I don’t know whether the fault lies with the star. But Pradeep Ranganathan plays Agan as smarmy, slimy creature of self-gratification who would like to believe he is a noble soul. It is a self-image he fails to live up to.
Most of the film is about Agan trying to bring Kural together with her second love interest (after Agan spurns her). Hridhu Haroon as Padhi reminded me of the oblivious loverboy played by Aditya Bhattacharya in Shyam Benegal’s Mandi, although Haroon being a better actor, brings a bounce to the flat underwritten character.
Too much bounce is the undoing of Pradeep Ranganathan’s performance. As Agan, he is all over the place, trying to be the tragic beef and the comic relief. The do-gooder who wants to be the best version of himself. But the anarchic plot won’t let him. The screenplay pushes Agan’s love for Kural into a corner and watches him squirm as he tries to extricate his feelings from the stickly tangles that are created for purposes of “crazy entertainment”
Crazy, Dude assuredly is. But the zigzagging storytelling never reaches its potential. A looming silliness lords over the proceedings, with Agan’s uncle, who happens to Kural’s father (yes, they are first cousins and about to get married to one another!) playing a cross between a pompous patriarch and the Shakespearean clown.
Fine actor that Sarath Kumar is, he fails in his performing duties, probably because his character has never heard of Shakespeare.
The characters, propelled by the rudderless script, have an irksome tendency to push the plot to the brink and then declare the ensuing absurdity as a “prank”. This self-preservative device doesn’t quite bail out Dude from the bottomless pit of absurdity it pushes itself into.
Sorry, Dude. But this is not entertainment. It is a test of endurance.
