Cast: Sampoornesh Babu, Sanam, Viva Harsha, Annapurna, Bhavani, Prudhvi
Banner: 24 Frames Factory
Music: Seshu
Cinematography: Satish Muthyala
Producer: Manchu Vishnu
Direction: Akshat Ajay Sharma
Tagline: Repetitive Comedy!
Avg User Rating: 2.75/5
Plot:
Singham (Sampoornesh Babu) is a powerful Sub Inspector of Police who is born with the uniform. He completes degree in just three years , takes police training in five years and becomes like a fear factor for every criminal in the city. There exists a fierce power named Lingam in a place called Singarayakonda who challenges the existence of Police Department itself. Lingam despises Policemen and makes his town deprived of Police stations or Police. The home department finds this quite tedious because of the ever increasing prices of bricks and cement to construct new police stations! An exasperated Home department gets Singham to the scene who has got his police training in Peddapuram by then. A clever Singham maintains undercover Police Station in Singarayakonda. He establishes his Police Station abode in Post Office. While fighting over the bad deeds of Lingam, he falls in love with Chandini (Sanam). The interval bang reveals a shocking secret that Singham is indeed a prisoner but not a Police. Who is this Singham? What does his flashback comprise of? How does he throw out Lingam from the town- forms the rest of the plot.
Performances:
Sampoornesh Babu: It is entirely his one man show and he is the reason why one should watch the film. Sampoo’s funny histrionics, body language and hilarious moments make it little worth to watch. But, his performance in Hrudaya Kaaleyam was much better. If only parody is taken as an expectation, Sampoo’s acting is beyond satisfactory.
Bhavani and Others: Bhavani has done lot of over action in the role of Lingam. The female lead Sanam is abysmal. Prudhvi manages to generate some laughter but Viva Harsha doesn’t get a good role. Even the naturally talented actress Annapurna fell for the over action trap in this film.
Direction:
The director cleverly gives a disclaimer before itself saying that one shouldn’t search for any plausible logic in the film. So, let us ignore that once for all. The audience usually expect hearty laughs in a Sampoornesh Babu film and that was why Manchu Vishnu did not worry about storytelling and the connecting points. He chose hit films and rewrote them in a parody format. Sampoo was replaced by all the top heroes and films such as Gabbar Singh, Legend, Race Gurram, Vikramarkudu and Dammu. The dialogues rendered by Balakrishna and Bunny were powerfully retold by Sampoo in this flick.
Interval Bang: It has strange resemblance with Student no.1 but there is no relation to it with the main storyline.
The director blindly relied on spoofs of Hit films and applied the formula sincerely. The montage scenes where Annapurna getting pregnant, her delivery, jumping into Singarayakonda lake and getting rescued in a South African swimming pool were taken well. Out of forty scenes in the film, only few scenes manage to generate good laughs. It is difficult to bear Sampoo in an entire film. However , it is more bearable to watch him in bit comedy scenes when aired on TV. It is alright to have certain parody scenes for a film but to have a film entirely based on spoofs is somewhat difficult. As a result, the film doesn’t create a positive impact but actually gets repulsive at one moment. The film is poor on technical aspects as well and the filmmakers apparently worked over tight budget for it.
Merits:
- Sampoornesh Babu's Histrionics
- Parody Concept on Blockbuster Telugu films
Demerits:
- Repeat Comedy sequences
- No innovation in the script
- Poor acting performances
- Below average technical department
Others:
The dialogue writer Diamond Ratnam didn’t keep any extra efforts for this film. He ripped the dialogues from earlier hit films and produced them as it is. There are few punch lines here and there. Story and screenplay are quite mediocre. Music and cinematography also fails to impress and even short films look much better than this flick.
Verdict:
With Hrudaya Kaaleyam, Sampoo earned great fans and lot of hope that he would become the next comedy star of Tollywood. The plot for Singham 123 suits this category but because of director’s negligence, the hope failed. In a film with duration of 2 hour 15 minutes, only fifteen minutes generate genuine laughter. Otherwise, it is an avoidable fare.
