Sometimes, as much as you try to watch a film with an open mind, and enter the world the writer and director have envisioned, it becomes a tad impossible. Kabzaa, starring Upendra, Sudeep, Shriya Saran and Shivrajkumar, is ambitious in terms of scale and grandeur, but the KGF hangover is evident through the movie.
This is another pan-India attempt, but even the Kannada version seems surreal, and you’re not really able to place the film anywhere, even geographically. Some characters speak in Hindi, Telugu and Tamil, and that is akin to ticking off all those languages in the pan-India check-list, I assume.
One of the reasons for the KGF hangover is the similar colour scheme as Narachi — grey, dark grey and charcoal black — and even as you peel your eyes to make sense of human outlines in that darkness, the characters, blessed with way better eyesight, shoot on target, like they were meant to be. But, cinematographer AJ Shetty captures this dreary world well. The art director is the usually-versatile Shivakumar, who also did KGF and Vikrant Rona.
