Well sometimes it’s difficult to understand when there are continuous duds for an actor. Has it something to do with the incapability to judge scripts? Is it about the limited talent of the actor? Or both of them? Well, we are talking about Ram Pothineni, who has been doing some really insipid films with hackneyed plots. Shivam increases this count by 1.
Shiva is a gutsy chap and all he does in his life is saving an eloped couples and getting them married. The movie begins when he is saving the 112th couple which is of course followed by a fight and that of course followed by an introduction song. While travelling in a train, he sees a pretty lady (Rashi Khanna as Tanuja) running through the fields screaming ‘I Love You’ practicing for her college play. Shiva instantly falls in love, jumps out of the train and starts stalking her. This happens in Kurnool, where there is a rowdy village head, whose son was beaten up recently by Shiva during a tussle. So, Shiva is after Tanuja and Bhojireddy is after Shiva. Parallely, there is Abhi (Abhimanyu Singh) who is a ruffian too, and has a strong desire to marry Tanuja. The rest of the movie is about how the brainy gutsy unbeatable undefeatable petite hero wins the girl and thwarts the two villains.
Right from the beginning the film carries a monotonous tone along with a typical bunch of punch dialogues delivered by the hero. The end is well-known and predictable but that is not the issue. However the story moving in all directions to reach the end point is so tedious. The debutant director seemed to have been influenced by all the commercial potboilers that have come in the last decade. Though, he gives certain creative touches, the underlying soul remained spiritless. His comedy score is mediocre too. All the comedy scenes penned were nothing really new. The group of comedians he roped in did exactly the same which we have already seen numerous times. The antagonist is not taken seriously either. Throughout the whole movie, Shiva is shown as a super power and super intelligent, and wins against the villains in every scene he confronts. That too keeping in mind the petite structure of Ram, the suspension of disbelief can be disregarded every minute in the film.
Rasool Ellore’s work is usual. No complaints about that. Devi Sri Prasad gave one of the weakest albums of his career. The songs speak bounds about that. Not even one track is likeable. Ram has offered absolutely nothing new in the film. It’s high time he chooses the right scripts. Rashi Khanna was unimpressive too. Poor girl was made to wear some costumes which clearly reveal her recently added weight.
Apart from the stale story and screenplay, the lengthy duration makes the film much more torturous.
The boredom of nearly 3 hours beats you to death and you end up as ‘Shavam’ (corpse) after watching Shivam.
