Sumanth Prabhas Film Is a Chaotic, Unfunny Take on Modern Dating
Director Venugopal Reddy’s aimless film rides on cultural stereotypes, outdated gags, and performances that are devoid of spark to salvage it either.
There’s no harm in telling stories revolving around good-for-nothing protagonists revelling in their silliness. In fact, such characters offer an average viewer a better chance to relate to them. Romanchakam is about one such young man and a group of wastrel friends. It is quite apparent that director Venugopal Reddy doesn’t want you to take the film too seriously.
Anvesh (Sumanth Prabhas) is neck-deep in debt, with money-lenders repeatedly harassing him to repay his loans. He and his friends dream of building a startup around a dating app, Romanchakam. Yet all they do is indulge in verbal banter, booze from sunset to sunrise, and daydream about finding an investor. Their life takes a different course when Anvesh falls for a Chennai girl, Mythili (Ananthika Sanilkumar).
The film’s purpose, much like that of its protagonists, remains unclear from the beginning. At best, for a story of this nature, you’d either want to root for them or laugh with them. Not a single joke among the group of friends lands properly. Every second scene has his friends offering lame advice on how to make the girl fall for Anvesh. It is tiring to watch them rant about life on a terrace and endure the brain-rot humour.
There are various instances where the film is on the cusp of some madcap fun, but nothing comes of them. Suspecting his desperation, Mythili blocks Anvesh across all platforms once he decides to travel all the way to Chennai for a birthday surprise. After days of zilch communication, she randomly unblocks him, discusses her plans to visit Hyderabad, and asks Anvesh if he could arrange a flat for her stay.
Then, as Mythili lands in Hyderabad, she goes missing. There’s tension around a suicide in the city, and an amusing cop-cum-aspirant-actor enters the picture. This had immense potential to be a hilarious track in the hands of a capable writer. Soon, after the girl is found, there are dramatic dialogues around how Anvesh misused her trust. Later, she comes up with a stale sob story about the reason behind the trip.
The money-lenders keep threatening fresh trouble in Anvesh’s life. He and his friends even land in jail, where their parents give them an earful. Suddenly, there’s a long monologue about Anvesh finding direction in his life. He lectures on how a man can never understand what a woman goes through—everything from her periods to public safety and domestic duties.
After all this, you wonder if Anvesh is a changed man. Not quite. He calls himself Anvesh 2.0, but he and his friends only get drunk and drive to Chennai later to stop a marriage. The climax, even if 90s-styled and predictable, serves as an ideal foil for humour through mistaken identities. Even if it doesn’t explode the way one expects, it ensures a few laughs.
Barring this rare occasion, the dialogues are puerile and the actors struggle with their timing. Perhaps it’s also because the film has nothing in it to inspire even one convincing or genuine performance. Several scenes are prolonged needlessly, with jokes stretched to the point of exhaustion, probably to ensure a two-and-a-half-hour runtime.
The leads and supporting characters shout at the top of their lungs, their tone nearly mirroring the film’s desperation to be funny. Sumanth Prabhas should ideally stop riding on the carefree-boy image from his debut outing Mem Famous. Even if the backdrops and stories of his previous film Godari Gattu Paina and Romanchakam are different, the performances feel redundant.
Ditto for the talented Ananthika Sanilkumar, who needs to exercise caution regarding her script choices if she has set her eyes on longevity. Upendra Limaye continues to be in Animal mode across every outing, and his odd Telugu dialogue delivery is another distraction. The songs, by Kannada composer Vasuki Vaibhav in his Telugu debut, drop in at the most unexpected situations to fill up the film’s emptiness.
Beneath the clutter, Romanchakam may have wanted to be an unserious take on modern-day dating realities with a dose of confusion comedy, but no one on the team is committed enough to making it work. It results in yet another Telangana film where friendship thrives around booze and misogynistic banter masked as comedy.
Rating: 1/5
