Godse review: This vigilante thriller is a loud, outdated, colossal mess

1.5/5

Story:

Godse a.k.a Viswanath Ramachandra and his group kidnap several influential politicians in Hyderabad. Godse has a strange set of demands from the State if they are to be freed. He only wants a special officer Vaishali to negotiate this deal. What connects Godse to Vaishali and what compels him to take on the system?

Review:

There are two ways to approach a vigilante drama - one could sugarcoat the protagonist’s anger against the system with adequate commercial flavour to drive the message across or one could take the serious, intense route to convey his side of the story. Godse chooses the latter but only sounds like a loud rant with no larger purpose.

The film talks truth to power in an angst-filled tone and tries to be the voice of many youngsters who settle for a meagre existence despite their strong academic credentials. Point taken sir, but the storytelling needs to have a larger purpose and a direction too to strike a chord. Films like Godse happen when a director is obsessed with an idea more than a story.

The so-called vigilante Godse in a negotiation call with cops calls a female officer ‘hot’, even asks for her ‘measurements’ and to show him her ‘physique’. How is a viewer supposed to empathise with a man who’s notorious for his loose talk, even if he was standing for a tall cause?

Godse believes he’s a God-sent saviour for the country and is too naive to believe that killing all corrupt bureaucrats in one stroke will be a panacea for the public. When the film gets to his backstory and the injustice meted out to his loved ones, the treatment is too generic, melodramatic and old-school - everyone in the story indulgently looks into the camera and shouts at the top of their voice.

The story is relevant only when it tries to mirror the frustration of many NRI businessmen who return to their home country with a lot of hope and lose all their enthusiasm for their dreams owing to bureaucratic red-tapism and corruption. Godse throws many stats at you to justify its stance though the story lacks detailing and is perennially in ‘activist’ mode.

Director Shankar has created a unique brand for himself in vigilante sagas over the years and modern-day filmmakers continue to make vain attempts to recreate his magic on the big screen. The former’s purpose is always clear - to entertain the average viewer and the anger against the system is only a tool to drive the story.

Godse isn’t even worthy of being labelled a poor man’s Gentleman and it’s hard to take the film seriously, given the below-par filmmaking. The director’s idea of style is to make most of the characters in the film wear black blazers and funky overcoats. The background score is painfully over-the-top and there’s no focus on the craft or the technical appeal.

There’s no dearth of potential in Satyadev but he must not underestimate himself and be a part of lousy attempts like these time and again. He hams too much and struggles to shoulder a weak script. Aishwarya Lekshmi may have chosen Godse because it doesn’t slot her as a regular commercial heroine. However, her role and the film are forgettable, to put it mildly.

None of the supporting actors makes an impact, be it Sijju Menon or Prudhviraj or Noel Sean or Chaitanya Krishna. Brahmaji and Tanikella Bharani have nothing much to offer either. The special appearances of Priyadarshi and Naga Babu are wasted. The sensationalised references to Nathuram Godse were unwarranted.

Verdict:

But for Satyadev and Aishwarya Lekshmi, Godse, inspired by director Shankar’s vigilante sagas, is largely intolerable.