A manic mashup of disparate elements that do not ever achieve the seamless fusion that the makers seek, Game Changer, writer-director Shankar’s first Telugu venture, is weighed down by a screechy and incoherent first half that is designed to play up lead actor Ram Charan’s explosive action hero persona.
The star shines bright enough but the film does not live up to the claim that the title makes.
The angry young man in Game Changer pays a heavy price for what he is. So, post-intermission, the film and its protagonist change their stripes drastically to make room for a high-minded, politically inflected social message regarding electoral malpractices, corrupt politicians and a committed bureaucrat’s role in an overdue clean-up.
Needless to say, the construct that Game Changer rests on has nothing new to offer. With the exception of a stylistic flourish here or a colourfully conceived and lensed musical number there, the film struggles to deliver anything that could be deemed genuinely inspired or original.
The Game Changer hero, Ram Nandan (Ram Charan), district collector of Vishakhapatnam, peddles his brand of electoral reforms as his principal adversary, an unhinged Bobbili Mopidevi (S.J. Suryah, who hams to his heart’s content), makes a bid for the chief minister’s chair.
The latter declares that he has no respect for the law. The former, no matter what he would have us believe, does not shy away from taking the law in his own hands, of which the film provides ample examples along the way.
But the audience is, of course, conditioned to see one man as a hero and the other as a villain. No nuance is allowed edgewise into the film.
But before Game Changer, produced by Dil Raju’s Sri Venkateswara Creations, gets to the point of the story where an intrepid electoral officer vows to stand in the way of a crooked politician’s self-serving ambitions, it expends well over an hour to show the audience where the protagonist has come from.
The film wends its way past several generic signposts that see the hero singlehandedly (what else?) fight off a gang of hoodlums on a train hurtling through Uttar Pradesh, don the suave garb of an unimpeachable IAS officer after slipping out of a policeman’s uniform and, in a longish flashback, appear as a college student with severe anger issues and a love affair that ends unceremoniously.
That he miraculously goes through the motions without a strand of hair out of place or a single scratch on his body is meant to impress upon us that Ram Nandan is no ordinary bureaucrat. More than using his pen to sign orders, he demonstrates the might of his fists.
The girl Ram Nandan loves, Deepika (Kiara Advani, who pops up only when the script mounts a song and dance set piece or feels that the hero needs a pep talk), is almost an afterthought. After all what would a super-macho man be without a pretty woman in his arms or on his motorcycle’s pillion?
Does Deepika have anything more to contribute to Ram Nandan’s evolution? Well, she does. She wants him to find meaningful solutions to problems rather than resort to violence. Channelise your fury, Deepika says to Ram Nandan. He takes the advice to heart and does all that he can to tone down his burst of anger.
But our man has bigger battles on his hands than the one on the personal and romantic front. Illegal sand miners, food adulterers and violators of fire safety norms get his goat and the culprits have hell to pay because, as the audience learns in the early portions of the second half, his father (Ram Charan in a dual role) was a diehard anti-corruption activist and had floated a pro-people political party with the aim of weeding out money power from public life.
Ram Nandan’s wedding is disrupted by cops who arrive with an arrest warrant. He faces the charge of having slapped a minister. He is summarily escorted away.
Handcuffed to a police van – his tormentors are generous enough to let him have free use of one arm – and attired in a spotless white bridegroom’s ensemble, the IAS officer takes on murderous goons until, in a lucky break, the tables suddenly turn in his favour.
Game Changer is action-packed all right, but the film is bereft of logic. It goes backwards and sideways, in the latter case literally so in the form of a sidekick (comedian Sunil) who can neither walk straight nor look anybody in the eye.
This man is meant to be a butt of bemusement but the gags that he anchors are not particularly funny. But let’s hand it to the film, it does not stop trying. In the bad guy’s camp, too, it bungs in Jayaram in an ill-advisedly buffoonish avatar.
Jayaram plays Mopidevi’s elder brother who steps aside willingly when the younger sibling lays claim to the smeared political legacy of their adoptive father, Chief Minister Bobbili Satyamurthy (Srikanth).
In the opening moments of the film, the old man is on the verge of croaking but comes back hale and hearty from a hospital ICU. He decrees that, in his final year as chief minister, nobody in his party and government will be allowed to make money at the expense of the people.
Everything that the reformed politician says and does comes to naught. But that, by and large, is the fate of the film, too. Its twists and turns are wildly arbitrary, conjured with the sole aim of ensuring that Ram Nandan – he preens that his USP is his unpredictability – never has to concede the upper hand to the scheming, power-crazed minister Mopidevi.
In one particularly long slanging match between the minister and the district collector in the latter’s office, the two men go hammer and tongs at each other and enumerate the powers that they wield. You work for money, I work for the Constitution, Ram Nandan thunders. Mopidevi has no answer.
Game Changer is never found wanting in the matter of giving plausibility a wide berth and finding easy answers to complex conundrums. The film has a second half that is far better than the first, but taken together they do not add up.
It is undeniable that parts of Game Changer will appeal to its target audience. Be that as it may, if you aren’t a part of that segment of the audience, this is a film best left alone to peddle its wares to those that care for the kind of cinema it represents.
