Over the last couple of years, the Kannada film industry has grown in stature & the credit for that primarily goes to Prashanth Neel's "KGF" franchise as well as Rishab Shetty's "Kantara" (not to forget that projects like "Lucia", "U-Turn", "Garuda Gamana Vrishabha Vahana" etc. did indicate that there was a wave of change that was steadily setting in). This has invariably given courage to many producers to invest the big bucks and the directors to dream on a massive canvas. One such director happened to be R Chandru's "Kabzaa" which was touted as the next big thing. Hmm...the truth couldn't have been any further from that.
Without mincing words, I would have to state that Chandru has made a cheap rip off of "KGF" with many of the characters, sequences, music, colour tone & cinematography being almost identical. The protagonist borne out of Chandru's so called 'creation' is Arkeshwara (Upendra), the dreaded gangster in the 1970s & this movie is about his rise to the throne of the underworld. There is nothing much to talk about the script as it doesn't offer anything novel, on the contrary it felt amateurish at times when it tried to deviate from "KGF". On the technical side, despite being heavily inspired; A J Shetty deserves praise for the cinematography while Ravi Basrur's music was nothing more than noise that was painful for the ears. To add to the woes, at close to 134 minutes it does test our patience at many instances.
Even though the screenplay was lack lustered, there was still hope that maybe Upendra would do something worthwhile. Well he didn't & on the contrary, he seemed like a miscast in many of the sequences and his chemistry with Shriya, who performed reasonably was rather cold. Kiccha Sudeepa in a cameo was one of the positives while Shiva Rajkumar had an impactful screen presence. As for the rest of the cast, none of them are worth mentioning as it oscillated from being average to poor.
Verdict: Would be interesting to see whether they would go ahead with the sequel, as this was just plain pathetic stuff. In short, don't bother!!!
Rating: 1/5
Regards...Ben
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