There's a telling scene the film begins with, a bus filled with people who keep talking of Arun, an unseen individual whom all the strangers on the bus seem to know. Right then and there you know that you're dealing with someone who's prone to holding grudges and is willing to wait for a long time to extract his revenge, even if it means waiting for them to reach Kulu from Hyderabad. Why exactly does this man wait till they reach there and why now after so many years, you wonder, waiting for a plausible explanation to come through. And when it does come, you expect it to blow you away. But, does it?
Vikram (Naga Chaitanya) is the quintessential youngster with a happy family consisting of his sister (Bhumika), brother-in-law and loving niece Maha, whom he believes to be the reincarnation of his mother. Unfortunately for him, his family also consists of his twin Aditya, whom he absorbed before birth. Aditya is the polar opposite of Vikram, where the latter grabs pens and patiently woos women, the former is prone to to grabbing knives and slapping women on their bottoms - because why not, right? Aditya also likes to protect Vikram once in a while, when he's not too busy getting him into trouble.
The love of Vikram's life is Chitra (Nidhhi Agerwal), an old flame from college who now runs an antique store, filled with nostalgic pieces from the 80s and 90s. After hate-turned-to-love and misunderstandings galore, everything in Vikram's life seems to be finally in place, except it's not. Out to ruin him and his family is Arun (Madhavan), the cherubic looking evil incarnate, who thankfully steers clear of cliché by making his girlfriend a target too. When it's revealed why exactly Arun holds a grudge, it unfortunately comes as a fizzle instead of a bang.
In a tale where both the Savyasachi Vikram-Aditya and his evil counterpart Arun are important, simply not enough time is spent on building the character of the latter. In fact, the whole of the lengthy first half takes its own sweet time to establish the point. Despite the exciting start, proceedings turn slow with more than enough time spent on singing duets, romancing Chitra across two continents, leaning on family sentiment and a flashback establishing his childhood and the vanishing twin syndrome. Despite the few laughs peppered in between, thanks to Vennela Kishore and Shakalaka Shankar, one just powers through waiting for the film to get to the point.
And when it does get to it in the second half, the film still tries too hard to keep Chitra in the fold by injecting a tense narrative with yet another duet out of nowhere. At the end of it all, not enough time is simply spent on the cat and mouse game between Vikram and Arun. Whatever time is spent fails to make it engaging due to the dull narrative and the dynamics between the duo seems to run more on sheer luck than intelligence. An edge-of-the-seat thriller it is not.
What works for the film are the crisp visuals by Yuvaraj, MM Keeravani's music, and a few fights by Ram-Laxman which extract all the juice of the seemingly superhuman left hand. While Naga Chaitanya struggles with his facial expressions, not bringing the pain through in his blank face when needed, Madhavan aces through his role, despite it being underwritten and hastily explained away. Nidhhi Agerwal and Bhumika do the best with what they're offered, so do Rao Ramesh and Thagubothu Ramesh.
Watch this one if you're a Naga Chaitanya or Madhavan fan, but definitely leave your brains at home for this one.
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