Pushpa 2-The Rule, Review: You can Push-swag Smuggler Superhero Pa to the brink, but he’ll be back in a blink

Pushpa 2-The Rule, Review: You can Push-swag Smuggler Superhero Pa to the brink, but he’ll be back in a blink

Pushpa means flower in Hindi. Our protagonist is not a flower, but a fire. Not any ordinary fire, but as he declares, to his nemesis, Shekhawat, “wild fire.”. This ‘flowery wild fire’ learns the skill of swimming and holding his breath underwater for much longer than the average swimmer, instantaneously, when forced to fetch a cricket ball from the bottom of a pond. Apparently illiterate, or, at best, semi-literate, he lives in the Chittoor district of Telangana, so his natural mother tongue is Telugu. We watched the Hindi version, and the lip sync differs only slightly, thanks to good dubbing. Almost all the credit titles are in Hindi. Pushpa speaks to his wife and a few others, occasionally in Marathi, and masters spoken Japanese while being transported hidden in a container, to Yokohama, Japan, for about 3 weeks. He can also speak Bengali. These are some of the minor skills in which Pushpa has majored. In the pre-credit titles scene (a là James Bond movies) at Yokohama, he shows you that when he is bound by hands and feet, and suspended high above (The Rule?), lifted by a giant crane, you must suspend your cinematic disbelief totally, for what follows is a display of calisthenics that circus performers, with decades of experience and training, would shy away from, but are innate to Pushpa, and greeted with thunderous applause by fans of Allu Arjun, in the auditorium. Pushpa 2-The Rule is for them. Others are not likely to whistle or applaud at such ultra-super-human acts. And that includes some discerning and demanding critics, like me.

Okay, so the hero has the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) in the 160s-180s range. He uses that to transport contraband red sandalwood from Telangana to Madras, and onwards to SriLanka. After all, he is President of the Syndicate. This syndicate consists of two types of men: First, the harvesters of the sandalwood, and second, the henchmen and ‘slaves’ of Pushpa. Both will go to any extent to deliver the pricey red sandalwood to foreign shores, where it fetches a price of crores of rupees (one crore equals ten million) per consignment. The route to the port at Rameswaram in Chennai is hundreds of kilometres long, and there are some 100 trucks in the convoy, add to that a bald super-cop named Shekhawat (a Rajasthani surname), with a scar along his pate, who will do anything to stop the Pushpakers from crossing the Telangana state borders. Never mind the fact that Shekhawat is dumb enough to let the crops grow, the trees felled, the wood cut to size, loaded on trucks and well on its way. He believes in catching the smugglers red-handed, and getting media and police glory. Also, never mind the fact that besides doing his duty as a Superintendent of Police (SP), he is not averse to demanding a large share of the spoils in order to let the business prosper, when he is in a bargaining position. Shekhawat was there in Pushpa 1: The Rise, but will not be seen in Pushpa 3-The Rampage.

Writer-director Sukumar could well have named the trilogy Pushpa SWAG, Pushpa SWAGGER and Pushpa-SWAGGIEST (assuming that the flower power runs out of ammo after Part 3), for Pushpa is nothing without the swag. He walks with one shoulder raised, wears a stone dead look, and several metallic accessories around his neck and on his hands, which he jangles time and again to remind you that they are there, and what is Pushpa without the cross-legged, inciting sitting position? It was this posture that led to his sacking as an ordinary day-labourer, carrying wood from one place to another. That he is doing so deliberately is explained in one scene, wherein Pushpa is sitting in an aircraft, thousands of feet above sea level, and does not cross his legs. Clueless and wondering, they ask him about the same. He replies that high in the air, he is already a man looking down upon his enemies, and he does not need to cross his legs to intimidate them. And then there is the beard brush. Pushpa strokes his beard with hi his palm reversed, from left to right, with one hand, and, if the goings-on so necessitate, by both hands. On some privileged occasions, he lets others, mainly his wife, do the hair caressing. Is his beard a phallic symbol? Your guess is as good as mine. Question is, why did it take humiliation to trigger of his super-powers? Why did he have to work as a labourer, rather than run his on operations? Alright, this is a film, a work of fiction. So what? Does fiction have to be devoid of logic?

His stern gaze is dispensed with when he is at home, with his wife, and either of them start getting feelings for each other. Read ‘sexual arousal’ for ‘feelings’. His humble and dutiful, loving and doting, wife, is concerned only with matters of the kitchen and a desire to frame a huge picture of Pushpa with the Chief Minister of the state. But when Pushpa’s niece gets kidnapped, she demands that he should not spare the abductors the severest punishment, notwithstanding the fact that the girl’s father, Pushpa’s half-brother, has always denied Pushpa the family name, and abused him at every opportunity. And of course, whether it is in a dream sequence or a celebratory/religious occasion, the two indulge in the most erotic dances you can imagine, without actual physical contact. To keep her dignity intact, the writer has inserted an item song, wherein the more slithery, rubbery moves are left to the guest star and the dancing chorus girls. When she is pregnant and wants to visit the wash-room, he carries her across his shoulders, till he reaches the toilet seat, and carefully plants her there.

If there is romance of the husband and wife kind and tragedy of the kind that was epitomised in the South films of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, many of which were remade in Hindustani, coupled with the emotional track involving his mother and his step-brother, there are also elements of comedy. Taking the seats of legislators and ministers literally, he flies thrones and sofas to their houses, with millions of rupees stashed inside them. This is a recurring motif of the film. With the sums of money he has in his coffers, he gets his favourite legislator appointed Chief Minister. This is the same man who ‘made’ him, a few years ago. And what he does when a Parliamentarian and Central Government’s nephew dares to kidnap his niece is to be seen to be believed.

Setting totally immoral or amoral precedents, he bribes an entire police station staff into taking huge sums of money in exchange for their resignations, to leave the SP a lone hunter. He could have arranged for the transfer of the thorn in his side to another place, through a government order, but that would be too meagre a punishment for his ‘indiscretions. Instead, when forced to apologise for his acts to the SP, he reluctantly utters the big word, “SORRY”, only to throw his driver out of the car while driving back, and head for the place where he had tendered the apology to Shekhawat. Apparently a five-star hotel, the place is still reverberating with the sound of Pushpa’s “Sorry”, recorded by Shekhawat on a two-in-one radio cassette recorder (they went obsolete twenty years ago) and fed to TV channels. Driving at breakneck speed, he pushes Shekhawat into the swimming pool a few feet away, and urinates into the water while Shekhawat is still floundering. The undressing and purification of the SP follows, and it is not the first time that Shekhawat is reduced to a man almost or all in the buff in the franchise. This is the second example of toilet humour, the first being the scene wherein he carries his wife and plops her on the commode. There is little to distinguish here between toilet humour and wholesome comedy.

Having read so far, you would have a fair idea of the writing and directing of the film, which the credit titles attribute to Sukumar. But they do not acknowledge the twist in the tale borrowed from then ShahRukh Khan film, Raees (2017), wherein the smuggler hero uses the watery route to transport his contraband, taking advantage of a favourable water-level. This is replicated almost entirely in Pushpa 2-The Rule. Another borrowed twist comes from the 2024 Alia Bhatt starrer, Jigra, wherein the smugglers head for a nearby neighbouring country across the sea, to shake off the law, which is in hot pursuit in motor launches. Honouring international sea-faring law, the police of one country have no jurisdiction over the waters patrolled by the other country’s coast guard. So, how come the smugglers’ boats are allowed safe passage? Because they are fishing boats, and fishing boats are allowed in international waters, subject to a treaty between the two countries under reference. Again, never mind the fact that each boat has several logs of red sandalwood booty attached to its aft bottom. And what’s more, the man himself, Pushpa, or, to use his full name PushpaRaj, is waiting on the other side, to take control, once they land on the foreign shore, which is a mere six kms away. Frustration galore for poor Shekhawat, who has to quickly take an about turn, when the coast guard opens fir on his boat.

If you are an Allu Arjun and Pushpa franchise fan, you better watch this film, even twice. There is plenty and more to make you happy, applaud and whistle, eliciting Oohs and Aahs. If not, you might have a better option than going to the Pushpaland, and paying the price for it. He is in his element, and swag seems to have percolated down to his cerebrum and cerebellum, not to mention the medulla oblongata. He even manages to convince in his limited calisthenics-laden dances and intimate moments with his wife. And everybody loves a man who, when cornered, works out a way out that leaves his nemesis floundering and swearing. Pushpa has another personality trait: he asks his supporters to keep their distance when he is about to be up close and personal with his wife, making funny excuses for the delay in joining them in his drawing room, or when he tells women to move away because his anger is about to boil over and he is on the verge of spitting out expletives in this mode.

Rashmika Mandanna makes a comely, seductive wife to Pushpa, and matches the item song girl step for step, even when the trio are the centre of audiences’ attention. Her limited desires might not hold a candle for feminism, but can we really expect an oversize scheming and murdering thug’s wife to be anything like a feminist? Her bravado is limited to egging him on to restore the troubled relationship with his step-brother and to punish the goons who kidnap his daughter.

As Bhanwar Singh Shekhawat, 42 year-old Fahadh Faasil matches his quarry, but, for reasons that need not be spelt out, he remains several steps behind. Abdul Hameed Mohammed Fahad Fazil is among the highest-paid and most popular Malayalam actors. Son of director Fazil, Fahadh began his career at the age of 20, with his father's 2002 romantic film Kaiyethum Doorath. Hindustani films have yet to cast him, but with Pushpa 2, he makes a strong case for the jump from Kerala-Chennai-Telangana-Karnataka to Mumbai. Why was he cast as a Rajasthani is not clear, but he is fair, and can pass off as a North Indian, so if they wanted a variation in dialect from Hindi, the following choices were available: Punjabi, Bihari, Uttar Pradeshi, Haryanvi, Madhya Pradeshi or Rajasthani. Rajasthani is good enough. It is the move to try and pass off Pushpa as a Maharashtrian that pricks the suspension of disbelief. What do you say about words like "kissik" and "lappa lappa"? Inventions, or some high-end Hindi/Hinglish?

Pushpa 2: The Rule has a very large cast that includes Jagadeesh Prathap Bandari as Kesava "Mondelu", Pushpa's friend, Jagapathi Babu as Central Minister Kogatam Veera Pratap Reddy, Sunil as Mangalam Srinu, Prakash Raj as Mangalam Prakash, Anasuya Bharadwaj as Dakshayani, Mangalam Srinu's wife, Rao Ramesh as MP Bhumireddy Siddappa Naidu, Dhananjaya as Jaali Reddy, Shanmukh as Jakka Reddy, Satya as Japanese translator, Tarak Ponnappa as Kogatam Buggi Reddy, Pratap Reddy’s nephew, Ajay as Molleti Mohan Raj, Pushpa's elder half-brother, Sritej as Molleti Dharma Raj, Pushpa's second elder half-brother, Pavani Karanam as Kaveri, Pushpa's niece and Mohan's daughter, Saurabh Sachdeva as Hamid, Adithya Menon as Kogatam Subba Reddy, Pratap Reddy’s brother, Mime Gopi as Chennai Murugan, Brahmaji as Sub-Inspector Kupparaj, Aadukalam Naren as CM Narasimha Reddy, Kalpalatha as Parvatamma, Pushpa's mother and Sreeleela as the item-girl.

The photography, editing, art direction and music are of a high order, except that the second half peters out in comparison with the first half, something that is more than likely to occur when you make a film 201 minutes long. Polish cinematographer Mirosław Kuba Brożek captures all the ambiences very well, including surface, underwater and aerial shots. Naveen Nooli could have been more ruthless with the delete and cut buttons. Music (Devi Sri Prasad-DSP) goes well with the film, though the Hindustani songs, like the Hindustani dialogue do not have lasting quality. Perhaps lip sync and conforming to literal translation are the issues are to blame. The sets and locales are well created and crafted by Nani Devarapali and Rajkumar Gibson Talari. Babu Tyagi’s Special Effects are laudable. The titles come in stages, mostly in Hindi and sometimes in English as well. End credits roll at a speed that only P.T. Usha or Usain Bolt might be able to catch.

A gargantuan, spectacular ode to the male ego, the ego of a ruthless mass murderer and the biggest smuggler in his state, with the entire police force and the leaders up for sale, while the villagers falling at the feet of the Big Boss, are not the values we should impart to our teenagers and early 20sers. In fact, these are not values at all and should not be propagated through any medium, to any age groups. They find expression here thanks to our country being a democracy, and censorship standards that bend to accommodate films like Pushpa 2: The Rule. Yes, he is pushed almost to the brink, but returns with victory, renewed vigour and boundless vitality. PushpaRaj has all the qualities and strengths of a hero, only he is a dreaded criminal who toys with the police and the elected legislature of his state, and of the country. Should he be the role model we would like to adopt? The answer is a resounding “No”. Should the box-office revenue justify the subject and treatment? You got me there.

Rating: **

Trailer: https://www.google.com/search?q=pushpa+2+trailer+hindi&oq=Pushpa+2+Trailer&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqDQgBEAAYgwEYsQMYgAQyDQgAEAAYgwEYsQMYgAQyDQgBEAAYgwEYsQMYgAQyCggCEAAYsQMYgAQyDQgDEAAYgwEYsQMYgAQyDQgEEAAYgwEYsQMYgAQyDQgFEAAYgwEYsQMYgAQyDQgGEAAYgwEYsQMYgAQyDQgHEAAYgwEYsQMYgAQyDQgIEAAYgwEYsQMYgAQyEAgJEAAYgwEYsQMYgAQYigXSAQoxNjQzN2owajE1qAIIsAIB&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------#Scheduling a start time as 9.00 pm for the press preview, and starting at 9.40 is not a good idea, considering the length and an additional 20 minutes for the interval. Those who arrived at 8.30 pm, which was the call time for the show, would have spent 4 ½ hours at the cinema, and would be reaching home between 1.30 and 2 am, after spending a tidy sum on hired transport, which is not easily available at that hour, for an early morning dinner. It’s fine if you have your own vehicle. Not letting such misdemeanours affect your review is a battle between your body and brain, and if you are a conscientious critic, the brain wins in the end, for you key-in the review text only after grabbing some much-needed shut-eye. But what about the critics who have to submit their copy soon after seeing the film? They would face a nightmare.       

#This review does not contain any images due to a technical issue. You will find the pictures on my facebook page.