Director: Prashanth Neel
Cast: Prabhas, Prithviraj Sukumaran, Shruti Haasan, Tinu Anand, Eshwari Rao, Jagapathi Babu, Sriya Reddy, Garuda Ram
Available in: Theatres
Duration: 172 minutes
Salaar: Part I – Ceasefire is, at its core, a mass movie. Yet, it aspires to be so much more: at its heart is a city-state built by warring tribes that have walled themselves off from the world and evolved into militaristic outfits. There is a Game-of-Thrones style battle for power within these walls and a criminal empire that stretches out from them. This is a world of soot, fumes, and blood. It is rendered almost wholly in black, brown, and red: several scenes feel like they belong in a horror film.
These loftier ambitions frequently clash with what it has to be: a Prabhas vehicle. There is a subterranean conflict between its need for its characters to be rich, textured, independent chess pieces in the game for Khansaar, and the compulsion for these characters to be easily slayed by, shocked by, or reduced to singing praises of its hero. What we get as a result, is an awkward tug-of-war between the two that is in equal parts intriguing and frustrating to watch, where the world-building and the mass-pandering frequently interrupt and sabotage each other. This doesn’t have the easy alchemy of mass and mythology that Baahubali had, and yet the alchemy it does try to achieve is much more layered, much more variegated.