RRR: a delirious epic of Tollywood mythmaking

Sensible objections mount up while watching RRR, but Tollywood director S.S. Rajamouli has a gift for batting them away like few filmmakers working on this scale today. His maximalist, mythopoeic 182-minute tale of the tortured bromance between two alpha males embroiled in India’s fight for independence is certainly bloated and nationalistic. Its 1920s Raj-era British characters never rise above bland romance or boo-hiss caricatures. Playing one Governor Buxton and his wife, respectively, Marvel’s Ray Stevenson and Indiana Jones veteran Alison Doody relish such plummy sadism as “There’s hardly any blood. Hit him harder!”

But that casting callback to Spielberg’s event-movie heyday is your best clue to the storytelling confidence and showmanship with which Rajamouli unfurls this epic of nationhood. As with his two-film ancient-India saga Bahubali (2015/2017), RRR – ‘Rise! Roar! Revolt!’ – is a spectacle aimed at big rooms, a money-on-the-screen CGI-enabled action fantasy whose hyperreal violence is reminiscent of role-playing video games or the ‘heroic bloodshed’ mode of John Woo. When, in deep cover as an officer in the Indian Imperial Police, Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan) does solo battle against a vast crowd that’s gathered to protest Buxton’s casual abduction of a village girl, or when a ram-raiding truckload of wild beasts is unleashed as a Trojan horse of ferocious chaos at the governor’s ball, Rajamouli’s digital manipulations seem to bend space and time, while – crucially – still obeying their rules. As tigers leap and motorbikes are swung, the speed is modulated within the carnage of any given shot, slowing the heartbeat of the action before letting its pulse skip back to normal. It creates a hyper-presentness in the turmoil of the moment. Everything has a giddying digital elasticity.

In lockstep with this visual delirium, RRR’s priapic mythmaking around its leonine male leads risks being too much. As Rajamouli imagines a fictional friendship between these two historical figures – Raju and the contemporaneous revolutionary leader Komaram Bheem – he also deifies them with extra-human abilities, including preternatural strength, even an apparent ability to breathe underwater. But in place of the grinding self-seriousness of the western superhero picture, RRR boasts a kind of Olympian exuberance running through both its action and its musical sequences. One song gives a knowing, Greek chorus-style comment on the budding friendship, while the hyperventilating ‘Naatu Naatu’ number – filmed at the Mariinskyi Palace in Ukraine mere months before the Russian invasion – sees the duo hypnotically out-dancing a gathering of British stuffed-shirts.

Rajamouli himself joins in the dancing in the closing sequence, just after the rubber stamp motif that full-stops all of his movies appears in the top right of the screen. “An S.S. Rajamouli film”, it certifies, and boy do we know it.

► RRR is available to stream on Netflix now.