Watching the Telugu movie Bhola Shankar, headlined by Chiranjeevi and directed by Meher Ramesh, is like going back in time by a few decades but not in a good way. The film repackages outdated, formulaic tropes and presents them with the confidence that star presence — Chiranjeevi, Tamannaah Bhatia and Keerthy Suresh — is enough to salvage a listless narrative. Meher Ramesh, credited with ‘story development’, adapts an eight-year-old Tamil film Vedalam starring Ajith, which was no great shakes either. What unravels is a cocktail of a sappy brother-sister bond, cardboard-ish villain characters, a leading lady who is supposed to contribute to absurd fun and comes across as utterly silly, a lot of tasteless humour and loud, forgetful music.
Bhola Shankar is set in Kolkata. The city is immaterial, because, apart from a smattering of Bengali, visuals of the Hooghly bridge and Durga puja festivities, plenty of scenes have evidently been filmed on sets. Shankar (Chiranjeevi) arrives in the city with his sister Mahalakshmi (Keerthy Suresh), whom he enrolls in a fine arts stream. Later in the film, I think, there is a mention of her studying architecture in her graduation. Never mind. We aren’t supposed to remember and question such things. Her character goes through memory loss, so maybe we should also let it be. Meanwhile, the narrative is busy with its nods to the other famous Shankar enacted by Chiranjeevi — Shankardada.
