Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu movie review: Chiranjeevi and Anil Ravipudi settle for easy, contrived laughs

Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu movie review: There’s a specific disarming quality about Anil Ravipudi’s films. The ‘hit machine’ filmmaker has somewhat dominated the Sankranthi real estate for himself over the past few years, thanks to his ‘family-friendly’ cinema that has taken audiences away from the inflated, hyperbolic kind of cinema of recent times. Ravipudi has been defiantly uncomplicated and Telugu-first in his outlook, and given how that breed is rapidly diminishing, it feels obvious that he attracts many suitors who do not want to be fussed about watching a movie.

Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu is one such outing, in every sense of the word, that ideally appeals to every member of the audience. It has one of Telugu cinema’s ‘Mt. Rushmore’ icons in Megastar Chiranjeevi headlining it. It boasts another superstar, Nayanthara, who returns to Telugu cinema after a small gap. It has a vibe that befits the Sankranthi holiday mood, it has the right title to go with that vibe, and multiple other goodies packed in (the Victory Venkatesh special appearance included) to be the comedic escape that one seeks at the movies. It’s almost akin to a festive food spread that is pleasing to the eye at the very first glimpse, so it wouldn’t require a lot of coaxing on the host’s part to have their guests holding out their plates.

Chiranjeevi plays Shankara Vara Prasad, a celebrated national security officer who currently works for the Central Home Minister. Shankara is a re-imagination of the actor’s legendary Chantabbai character, in that he is the hero, no doubt, but of the bumbling kind who can also be the butt of the joke. A pattern that the film follows is that Shankara often makes bold claims about his intelligence or his team’s competence, and things go terribly wrong right after, until he springs back into form to prove just how good he is. There is a lot of high-flying action in the film that is used to play up the leading man, but since this is an Anil Ravipudi ‘universe’, the clincher isn’t the fights but the fact that the 70-year-old actor is being the goof all over again.

Add to this the fact that Shankara is divorced and emasculated, a man who dries washed clothes, mops the floor clean, and sheds a tear or two while watching a daily soap with his mother (Zarina Wahab, who is 66 years old, by the way). The strength of the writer-director’s work has always been that no one and nothing is off-limits for ridicule. Even the hero’s backstory gets that loud-cackle-and-high-five treatment as he recounts how he slipped from being a loving husband to an ultra-rich businessman’s daughter (Nayanthara), to a house husband. The central home minister (Sharat Saxena) is laughed at, Shankara’s team of four officials always has a joke or a jibe up its sleeve, and the film generally goes about solving all its problems in its raucous manner throughout its 165-minute runtime. That’s the good part.

Another good part is Nayanthara’s Sashikala. The actor is elegant as ever, and she seems totally at ease partnering Chiranjeevi in creating a romance/marriage that is cute, sweet and also believable in its own way. In fact, the best feature of the film would be this dynamic that starts with inventive meet-cutes and evolves into an ego tussle involving their two children, a new marriage suitor and whatnot. Chiranjeevi’s 70 (the age) might seem awkward in the vein of Nayanthara’s 41. But the trend isn’t one to go away anytime soon in popular cinema, so it might be worth focusing on what we see on screen: luckily, the Megastar has enough jaunt and energy in his body language to justify the pairing.

But Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu doesn’t take long to grow complacent, and that trait always remains unwelcome in the comedy genre. The humour in the setup portion works just fine, though the expectation is that the story is only going to become more exciting and make the laughs feel as organic as possible. We do get a turn in the plot on cue, which involves Shankara’s two estranged young children. Ravipudi makes this the emotional hook and lends it a Main Hoon Na kind of design that requires the father (and his subordinates) to move briefly to a boarding school and win over the kids. In conception, this is exciting for several reasons: the story isn’t just relocated to a new terrain, but set up to grow complicated in intriguing, often comical ways.

However, the complacency, too, sets in big time and Ravipudi’s writing starts to refuse to let the situation dispense comedy. Instead, he fills it up with contrivances that feel rather forceful; Characters pull funny faces despite the joke not being funny. Gags involving an overweight kid, a tribal man, a group of women who discuss fake cases against husbands, and so many more ‘low-hanging’ ideas become prominent. A far-fetched villain track is introduced to justify the action. A superstar cameo is ushered in to both retain and amp up the momentum, without any solid purpose. One of the charms of Sankranthiki Vasthunam was that the film’s broad humour flowed from the story and the inherent traits of its characters. Aishwarya Rajesh, for instance, gets involved in a deadly ‘national-level’ mission despite being an ordinary, unqualified mother of four. But one still bought it, and the farce was only amplified because of her character’s natural behaviour.

Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu, in contrast, wants to use a sense of nostalgia and familiarity in its stride, and one finds nothing wrong in that. There is nothing to discredit about its desire to be old-school as well. The problem is when it doesn’t put in the required effort to elicit laughter from the crowd, which is sure to forgive most other kinds of slip-ups. The problem is when the writing doesn’t carry much merit to do or be as it pleases. Venkatesh’s character being Venky Gowda, a Kannadiga who throws heavy one-liners in Kannada, could have been much more entertaining had the role been positioned with greater impact. Nayanthara getting mixed up with a criminal should have felt more dangerous, had the entire thread not been a mere placeholder for some action. Chiranjeevi’s relationship with his children could have produced some incredibly clever and memorable scenes, a la Main Hoon Na, had the film applied itself more.

The cavalier attitude also shows in the film not keeping up with the times, and not making certain decisions to suit the social decorum of 2025. The male protagonist literally slapping his female counterpart is treated with very little seriousness, and it doesn’t help that Anil Ravipudi offers a few inane arguments across the duration to further trivialise the matter. His film does say that the action couldn’t be condoned, but it doesn’t compel its own hero either to make amends to it even with a simple apology: the garb of comedy perhaps casts less focus on the brushing-off, but when a 8-10-year-old kid sitting next to you in the audience preempts that the hero is going to “slap a woman now” in a particular scene, it begs the question of responsibility and due diligence on the filmmakers and actors’ part. It doesn’t help either that the woman is made to say sorry in the end.

Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu is far from being a dud and is a bit of a breath of fresh air compared to what’s been up on the big screen of late. But the family entertainer has been Telugu cinema’s proprietary product for so long, and there is no doubt that audiences deserve much better films from the creators out there. In fact, this very team of creators – from the writer-director to the superstars involved – are capable of delivering something much superior, and they have done so many times in the past. Could Chiranjeevi’s timeless swagger and Nayanthara’s effortless grace still compensate here? It well might.

Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu movie cast: Chiranjeevi, Venkatesh Daggubati, Nayanthara, Catherine Tresa Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu movie director: Anil Ravipudi Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu movie rating: 2.5 stars