Director: Tushar Hiranandani
Writers: Jagdeep Siddhu, Sumit Purohit
Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Jyothika, Alaya F, Sharad Kelkar
Duration: 134 minutes
Available in: Theatres
The older I get, the less patience I have for Hindi cinema’s biopic-for-dummies template. Actually, that’s not true. I’ve always been impatient with Wikipedia pages parading as movies. I’ve always been annoyed with Amar-Chitra-Katha-styled storytelling for adults. I’ve always been irked by algorithmic narratives with binary emotions. It has nothing to do with age. It’s difficult to be polite about movies that not only add nothing to remarkable real-life stories, they subtract the life out of these stories. Srikanth is another brick in that artificial wall. The biographical drama of visually-impaired industrialist Srikanth Bolla is so content with its subject that it’s bereft of curiosity, creativity and connective tissue. It is little more than a platform for Rajkummar Rao, whose performance suffers from the condition of looking like a performance. In this case, his face is also too familiar for us to suspend disbelief and accept Srikanth’s tics.
The treatment is flat and simplistic, almost as if the film doesn’t trust its hero to be naturally inspiring. The writing is such that, ironically, the visuals are pointless: If you close your eyes and listen, every character is a human questionnaire. You won’t get admission. But why, teacher? Because the law doesn’t allow blind students to study science. You can’t take the flight, sir. But why? Because airline policy requires visually impaired passengers to be accompanied by one person. You can’t work in America, Sri. But why? Because you can be a role model in India and change the system. I tried closing my eyes a couple of times, and it was like hearing an audiobook. At one point, I forgot to open them – for a while.