Junior movie review: Kireeti Reddy makes quite the impression in film that’s not the most original

Junior movie story: College is where Abhinav (Kireeti) hopes to finally find some distance between him and his father, after enduring a childhood of helicopter parenting. He dedicates the 4 years of his engineering degree to making memories, with teachers, friends and a special someone. Desperate to keep his father at arm’s length, Abhi lands an internship with a software giant, where he’s relegated to digitizing CSR activity files and uncovers a scam within. In the process of setting this issue right, Abhi uncovers secrets about his family.

Junior movie review: When Crazy Star Ravichandran waxed eloquent about debutant Kireeti Reddy’s level of preparedness for his role in Junior, the assumption was that he was doing a perfunctory promotional interview. Turns out, he was dead serious. Kireeti makes quite an impression – he dances like a dream, throws a mean punch and kick and has fairly decent acting chops too – in a film that’s best described as a typical Telugu film.

Kireeti had protested such claims and stated that his launchpad is a Kannada film that was also made in Telugu, but let’s not kid ourselves – it’s crystal clear who the target audience is. The film is colourful and loud for the most part and yet, strangely enough, moderately entertaining too. A campus sequence designed to show off Kireeti’s parkour skills may elicit an initial eye roll, but you cannot help but admit that the boy’s good at what he does.

Director Radhakrishna dedicates much of the first half to light-hearted fun campus moments, including Abhi’s romance with fellow engineering student Spoorthi (Sreeleela). In a promotional interview, the actress had said that the role was not very challenging and that “she’s just there”. Now, here’s the thing – Junior was shot over three years, after Kireeti sustained an injury and was out of action for more than a year.

It seems that that by the time the team regrouped, they could either not get Sreeleela’s dates or could not afford her, because her character Spoorthi just disappears into thin air in the second half, even though she’s one of the interns, along with Abhi and pals, at a software major run by Genelia Deshmukh’s Vijaya. No explanation offered and the inclusion of the hit number Viral Vayyari is supposed to make up for that.

Kireeti is the axis around who the tale revolves, while Ravichandran and Genelia also have sizeable and impressionable roles. Ravichandran’s restrained father act is quite pleasing, as is Genelia, as the hot-shot boss. Kiran Srinivas gives off menacing antagonist vibes initially, but by the end of the film, he’s reduced to a snake with no fangs. Achyuth Kumar and Vijay Chendoor too have small and insignificant roles, as does Sudharani.

Junior’s a very richly-made film, so despite Abhi’s middle-class upbringing, he’s always kitted out in the best money can buy, including an unmissable pair of red-soled Christian Louboutin shoes. What’s unpardonable about Kireeti’s styling is that bouffant hairdo, the only purpose of which seems to be to be to give the small-framed actor a couple of extra inches. Get rid of it already!

Kireeti Reddy makes a promising start and now that he’s presented his two-and-a-half hour showreel, he can look at scripts with more meat to them. That said, Junior is not entirely a bad film; it’s got a few engaging moments, but by and large has a familiar feel to it. It’s not the most original story and is quite predictable too. If you’ve followed the film from its Bengaluru muhurtham, even the twist in Genelia’s arc will not be surprising, because she’d dropped a spoiler way back then.

Junior movie verdict: A good start for Kireeti, alas, in a film with not the strongest story. It’s moderately engaging, with romance, father-son and father-daughter sentiments, etc., so if you can convince yourself that logic be damned, Junior can just make for a decent one-time watch.-