RRR
RRR (Rise Roar Revolt)
Raudraṁ Raṇaṁ Rudhiraṁ

Every few years, it seems, a movie from India is released internationally under the proud boast of, "the most expensive film ever made in India!" This tagline, apparently accurate each time, does succeed in stirring up a significant amount of interest in Western audiences, but it takes more than curiosity about a budget to really pull in the crowds. For that, you need major word-of-mouth. And I can't think of too many international films in the past couple of decades that have gotten more positive word-of-mouth than 2022's "most expensive Indian movie ever made," RRR, written and directed by Indian box-office champ S. S. Rajamouli.

RRR (which stands for “Rise Roar Revolt”) is set during the British Raj in the 1920s and centers on two highly fictionalized versions of Indian revolutionaries who forge an unusual friendship and fight against the forces of colonialism. With a running time of over three hours, it combines historical epic, buddy comedy, comic book/superhero movie, action thriller, and nationalistic origin story, with heavy dashes of dance musical, martial arts action, and animated fantasy. It is exaggerated and over-the-top beyond the point of high camp but executed with such a fiercely sincere yet giddy commitment to its tone and style that we instantly get swept up in all its ridiculous amplified action and emotion. What makes or breaks a long, crazy, high-octane picture like RRR comes down to two simple questions: do we care about the characters? And is the story paced in such a way that we can take everything in without getting exhausted and bored well before the halfway point? In the case of RRR, both answers are a resounding, yes!

N.T. Rama Rao, Jr., plays Komaram Bheem, a tribal leader from Telangana who hunts tigers with his bare hands. Ram Charan plays Alluri Sitarama Raju, an intense, tightly coiled spring of a man who works within the British military as a respected and decorated officer. The story kicks off when a young girl from Bheem's village gets abducted by the British governor's sinister wife, played by the wonderful Alison Doody. (You may remember Doody as the Nazi temptress Elsa Schneider who seduces both Harrison Ford and Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). Bheem must travel to Delhi on a mission to rescue the little girl. There, he meets Raju when a train derails on a bridge and goes crashing into a river. The two must team up to save the life of a stranded child. This comically thrilling sequence, in which the two men enlist not only each other but also a large Flag of Indian Independence to swing back and forth under the bridge, is the first of many outlandish and exciting set pieces that combine cinematic heroics with unabashed nationalism. From this point on, the two men become fast friends, and we're treated to a bromance montage every bit as heightened and enjoyable as the bridge rescue sequence.

But, as is often the case in a spy thriller (or a romcom), the picture's central relationship is built on false pretences. Both men are concealing their true identities from each other, as each is on an opposite mission. Bheem secretly opposes the governor while Raju is secretly working for him. Whenever I see this well-worn relationship-based-on-a-deception scenario in the first act of a film, I always wonder whether by the time these two main characters eventually learn the truth about each other and have their inevitable showdown, will I care at all. Turns out that the confrontation happens much earlier than I was expecting. I guess I've just gotten so used to bloated American blockbusters with no sense of structure, far too many characters, and a total misunderstanding of what an "epic movie" is. Epics aren't just long films. Epics are movies that space out their narratives almost into chapters. They unravel their story patiently, via multiple types of scenes, sequences, and set pieces. While these types of pictures are usually remembered for their big stretches of elaborately staged action, what makes them work are the quieter scenes of character development and narrative exploration that reveal themes, underlying motivations, and historical, political, and cultural contexts.

What's wonderful about RRR is that it continually manages to surprise and delight. There are both expected and unexpected turns in the story, but these developments are not the empty plot twists that have become such a tedious aspect of contemporary "elevated horror" indies and creatively-bankrupt studio franchises. Rajamouli structures his film like a great Sergio Leonie western or Park Chan-wook revenge thriller. Just when it needs to, the story digresses into a fascinating exegetical sequence or veers off to explore a backstory in ways that almost feel like we're suddenly watching a different movie. And we happily go where the film takes us because the new characters and situations we find ourselves suddenly introduced to are every bit as intriguing as the ones we just spent the last hour getting invested in. This style of lengthy "flashback" or extended introduction of a new character—occurring deep into the film's running time—has been a staple of Asian and European films for decades, but few American writers and directors seem to adopt it with much success. Ang Lee and James Schamus did with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Quentin Tarantino did with the Kill Bill movies and Inglorious Bastards. But those pictures are using and paying homage to narrative tropes of specific genres. When superhero movies and American crime thrillers attempt this extended backstory technique, they almost always rush through it. They forget that downshifting into a kind of quasi-first-act of a new story gives an audience a chance to breathe, reset, and reengage our curiosity. These new narrative threads are not simply exposition delivery systems that "explain" why a character is a certain way; they are films within a film. They are new chapters or divergent sections of the larger story. They are the very reason why a great action-packed epic doesn't feel long or become tedious.

RRR is not deep. It plays on our most fundamental emotions. Its politics are broad and without many nuances. Its themes of friendship, loyalty, and fighting back against colonial oppression are almost rudimentary. But its screenplay is neither simple nor dumbed down. It tells a compelling story with richly drawn characters we engage with instantly. We find these protagonists exciting, not only because they fight CGI tigers or dispatch hundreds of men with little more than a sword and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but because we resonate with their goals. We feel their anger, joy, frustration, love, and betrayal. We also just like hanging out with them, so much so that the movie quickly became a cultural phenomenon, luring crowd-adverse audiences back into packed cinemas for multiple viewings. Many art houses and major exhibitors booked the picture to run all through 2022 and into 2023 often on IMAX and Dolby Cinema screens because, like Top Gun: Maverick and Everything Everywhere All At Once, the experience of watching this movie with a crowd on a huge screen is impossible to replicate at home. Since a small distributor bought the American streaming rights to the original Telugu-language version of the film, most viewers unfortunately also saw RRR dubbed into Hindi or English on Netflix. (At least the original actors did the Hindi dubbing.) However, the film is good enough to enjoy in even the most subpar viewing situation. And for those lucky enough to see RRR in a big theater in its original language with an enthusiastic audience, it was one of the year's best cinematic experiences.

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