Bhooty Call: Raju Gari Gadhi 2

Raju Gari Gadhi 2 (2017) has basically nothing to do with Raju Gari Gadhi or Raju Gari Gadhi 3, apart from ghosts and the presence of actor Ashwin Babu.  Ashwin usually plays the hero, but here he's one of the three comic idiots, and nearly disappears when the movie shifts genres.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Ashwin (Ashwin Babu), Kishore (Vennela Kishore), and Praveen (Praveen) are three idiots and lifelong friends who have pooled their money to open up a resort hotel.  The three are varying degrees of horrible; Praveen likes to ogle the female guests, especially Suhanisa (Seerat Kapoor), Kishore is actively scheming to trick them into bed despite being married, while Ashwin saves his ogling for his online girlfriend (and the occasional Sunny Leone video.)  

Kishore convinces Suhanisa to come to his room and look at his etchingsastrology book, and while there he tries to take a picture, only to notice that she does not show up on camera.  he freaks out, and runs to tell the others that  Suhanisa is a ghost.  They mock him for it, but spooky stuff keeps happening, and after Ashwin's scantily clad Skype session with his girlfriend is interrupted by ghostly static and watery footprints moving across the ceiling, the trio call in the local Catholic priest (Avinash) to perform an exorcism. 

The priest is useless, so he suggests they contact Rudra (Nagarjuna).  Rudra bills himself as a mentalist, but he's basically every cop show gimmick from the past few decades wrapped up in a single person - he he profiles, he uses cold reading and interprets microexpressions, mixed with a bit of hypnotism and a smidgen of genuine psychic ability.  Once Rudra shows up, the movie changes genres and becomes a police procedural, with Rudra solving an unrelated murder in order to establish his bonafides.  

Once the murder is solved, Rudra arrives at the resort, where he quickly establishes that yes, the place is haunted, and no, Suhanisa isn't the ghost, you dorks.  He manages to cajole the actual ghost into making contact, and learns that her name is Amrutha (Samantha Ruth Prabhu), and that she was a brilliant law student before meeting her tragic end.  In life, Amrutha believed that any case could be solved by answering three questions: Who?  Why?  What did they gain?  And he is determined to those three questions on her behalf.

While Raju Gari Gadhi 2 shifts wildly from genre to genre, it's never particularly scary; it's hard to be frightening when the ghost is consistently the most likable and sympathetic character in the cast.  Still, it turns into a decent drama once it stops being an idiotic sex comedy.  On the other hand, the shifts in genre do create some cognitive dissonance.  One of the themes of the movie is that women should be treated as people rather than as attractive objects, but the early part of the movie still objectifies the hell out of Suhanisa, and the three idiots engage in some terrible behavior which is brushed off as just boys being boys.  It doesn't quite manage to live up to its own themes.