There are some things that naturally go together: pencil and paper, fish and chips, bread and butter, tricks and treats, and, if Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo (2020) is any indication, bombastic South Indian action movies and mid-nineties Bollywood style family drama.
Wealthy businessman Ramachandra (Jayaram) and his employee Valmiki (Murli Sharma) have sons born on the same day at the same hospital. When it seems that Ramachandra's son has stopped breathing, Vamiki talks the panicked nurse (Sachin Khedekar) into switching the babies. When the baby starts breathing again, though, Valmiki refuses to switch them back; it turns out he's not motivated by an almost feudal devotion to his employer, he's motivated by jealousy. Ramachandra and Valmiki started at the company at the same time, but Ramachandra moved up rapidly and married the CEO's daughter, Yasodha (Tabu.) Knowing that his own son is living a life of luxury while his enemy's son struggles to make ends meet is the perfect revenge. The nurse tries to stop him, but conveniently falls off a balcony, while Valmiki is struck with a sudden leg cramp that will persist for the next twenty five years.
Valmiki's son grows up in the aforementioned life of luxury, eventually growing into Raj (Sushanth), a young man whom is somewhat spoiled but struggles to find the courage to express himself. Meanwhile, Valmiki raises Bantu (Allu Arjun), who is brave, clever, spectacularly good at punching, and devoted to absolute truth. Bantu has spent his entire life trying to win the approval of the man he thinks is his father, but while he excels at everything, it's never enough.
Look, I'll be honest - this movie has a lot of plot, and we'll be here forever if I don't fast-forward to the main conflict. After a number of (quite interesting and worth watching, even though I'm skipping over them now) misadventures, Bantu finds a job with a travel company, and a potential love interest in his boss Amulya (Pooja Hegde). He accompanies her to a business meeting, where he forcefully refuses an overly aggressive potential buyer, just as Raj fails to do the same with Paidathalli (Govind Padmasoorya), a gangster who wants to buy half the company.
Ramachandra overhears Bantu's meeting, and is impressed with the young man. His father-in-law ARK (Sachin Khedekar) is equally impressed with Amulya, and decides to get her married to Raj. The pair are quickly engaged before either of them can express their reluctance, and when Bantu and Amulya visit Ramachandra to clear up the confusion, they discover that he has been stabbed by Paidathalli's father, Appala Naidu (Samuthirakani). Bantu manages to bring Ramachandra to the hospital, where he is quickly brushed aside by the family and finds himself sitting next to a coma patient who happens to be the nurse from the beginning of the movie. She tells him the truth and promptly dies. Bantu decides that he can never tell anyone the truth because it would hurt to many people, but his birth family is kind of a mess so he resolves to help them with the power of absolute candor and also to punch all the bad guys, and that's when the movie really takes off.
Whew. It sounds like there's a lot going on, and there is a lot going on, but the pacing is good enough that you hardly notice, and Bantu is a likable and engaging protagonist, so it is easy to get caught up in his story. The songs are fun, the action scenes are wonderfully over the top, and the climax manages to combine the two in a way I've never seen before. The whole movie is like that, really. It's cinematic chocolate and peanut butter, combining things I like in unexpected ways.
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