RRR (RISE, ROAR, REVOLT)

If you've already seen writer-director S. S. Rajamouli's two-part mythic masterpiece Baahubali, you probably have some idea of what to expect from the filmmaker's take on two real-life revolutionaries in 1920's India. If you haven't, both movies are on Netflix and they absolutely shred.

RRR (Rise, Roar, Revolt) is very much in the same vein, and is about as much delightfully maximalist bang for your buck as you could possibly want from an historical epic drama where everything starts at "11" and goes up from there.

 

Taking serious creative liberties (the entire film being a "what if" scenario imagining these figures meeting and becoming bosom buddies), RRR follows the chance meeting and dramatic friendship between Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan) and Komaram Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr.) after the kidnapping of a young Gond tribal girl by the colonial British Governor Scott (Ray Stevenson, absolutely devouring the scenery). Bheem is the herculean protector sent to retrieve her, a man so mighty that he could only be checked in his mission by someone equally strong and deeply driven.

 

Most of the film is about the events surrounding these two men meeting by chance and immediately becoming best friends, and the fallout when the other shoe inevitably drops: Raju is a highly driven officer in the British garrison tasked with capturing Bheem before he can make trouble for the governor. The last thing I want to do is undersell the film or how effective its storytelling is (in spite of being pretty broad) in this film, but there's not a whole lot that's terribly complicated going on with the narrative. There are a couple initially obfuscated (but not super hard to puzzle out) motivations and some deliberate use of "flashbacks as reveal" that feel more like a composer finding just the right place for notes instead of feeling smug about their own cleverness.

 

Charan is an absolute powerhouse as Raju, playing the character's inner turmoil on every inch of his face and nailing the physicality demanded of him during the gleefully stylized action scenes. Rama Rao Jr. gets to do a delighful "Clark Kent / Superman" routine as he's undercover trying to find his way into the govenor's mansion. While the two leads are very much center stage, the film finds plenty of room in the supporting cast for meaty memorable sequences. Alia Bhatt's Sita anchors almost an entire half of the film's emotional energy, and Olivia Morris as the governor's neice, Jennifer, has great chemistry with Rama Rao Jr. in the much more interesting version of what could have been a pretty thankless roll. I already called out Stevenson's delectably despicable one-dimensional villain (look, sometimes colonialists are just monsters), but one of my favorite surprises was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade's Alison Doody showing up as a perfectly manicured nightmare matriarch.

My favorite surprise, however, is just how the film's long-promised third-act spectacle comes together in ways that aren't necessarily surprising, but incredibly satisfying. The film lays all its cards out a little over halfway through the meaty 3-hour runtime, and spends the rest of the movie laying out track on a near-nonstop downhill race toward the inevitable team-up. Along the way, some elements that at first seemed like a bit of throwaway fun get unexpected emotional weight (there's a big musical number earlier on that is the gift that just keeps on giving), and while Rajamouli never goes as insanely big with his spectacle here as the epic battles of the Baahubali movies, the creativity and clarity of the action is astounding. The confidence that builds from every set piece to the explosive finale is a banner example of knowing precisely what you have and how to best employ it, and by the time the last 30 minutes kick into high gear it's simply some of the most satisfying large-scale "stuff we go to movies for" in a while.

I don't recommend this simply as a counterpoint to big movies currently in theaters or as a curiosity for international blockbuster tourism, because RRR is a towering piece of well-crafted entertainment in its own right. However, it's very unlike a lot of modern major Hollywood releases while also being entirely approachable to those unfamiliar with the filmmaker's previous work. This is not a film of nuance and subtlety, it's about dudes being bros and kicking the crap out of the British empire while looking incredibly dope.

 

When it comes to epic dramas packed with mirth, melancholy, and mayhem, they simply don't get much better than this.

(RRR is playing in theaters, and releases on Netflix later this year.)