Allu Arjun looks gorgeous in a saree. Whether he’s walking, dancing, crying, leaping in the air to beat people up, or swaying playfully with Rashmika Mandanna – both wearing equally beautiful silk sarees. That’s the major revelation in Sukumar’s Pushpa 2: The Rule. The rest of the film pretty much redraws the same motifs as its precursor, Pushpa: The Rise, with much less finesse.
The sequel, which could have been a complete letdown given the hype around it, recreates just enough of Pushpa’s (Allu Arjun) audacious air, his cockiness, his melodramatic pursuit of power and dignity, and his wonderfully dramatic wardrobe that conjures up a DIY aristocrat, to entertain fans. Yet, these are frayed seams that just about hold together a worn-out patchwork of a film.
Pushpa, a daily wage worker, rises to the top of a red sandalwood smuggling syndicate in the Seshachalam Hills of Andhra’s Rayalaseema in the first film. In the second instalment to the franchise, he grows even more powerful within the syndicate, among his employees, and with politicians and businessmen across the country, establishing his ‘rule’. A third part is also in the pipeline – Pushpa 3: The Rampage.
The word ‘rampage’ is also a very popular Telugu pop-culture usage that people like to pull up when there’s some kind of a big box office victory or other success, typically when talking about Tollywood stars and their films. ‘Allu Arjun’s box office rampage’, for instance.
Despite Allu Arjun’s popularity outside the Telugu states, Pushpa: The Rise’s success, especially in Hindi, was staggering. And The Rule begins with worrisome signs of turning into the average pan-Indian formula – a modular film assembling actors and aesthetics from different industries with a splatter of nationalism, with thoroughly unenjoyable elements based on uninformed assumptions of what people enjoy. The film does avoid this path, but the unadulterated ‘Telugu film’ that it is, is not that much better.
By the end of The Rise, Pushpa has risen up the smuggling syndicate’s power structure in Chittoor. In The Rule, he’s a kind don who takes care of his employees (labourers who fetch the wood from deep in the forest) and has earned their allegiance. He’s an indulgent husband to Srivalli (Rashmika Mandanna). The unhinged power games between Pushpa and Bhanwar Singh Shekhawat (Fahadh Faasil) continue as he establishes his ‘rule’ over the syndicate and beyond.
He still wants the same things as before: the respect denied to him for being born to an unmarried woman, for which he goes after power, money, and political influence. He makes shrewd, spectacular plans to smuggle the sandalwood, defies all authority, and is still his own ‘boss’. He still yearns for the legitimacy of his father’s surname, and his half-brothers’ approval.
The Rise itself was a conventional story that became remarkably fun mainly because of Allu Arjun’s persuasive star power, helped by an absorbing narrative and many interesting supporting characters, including Fahadh Faasil’s promisingly unstable IPS officer. But The Rule is heaped entirely on Allu Arjun’s tilted shoulders, blurring everyone and everything else.
Fahadh Faasil is still fun as the volatile, egotistic cop. But the film does injustice to an otherwise amusing, wacky antagonist. Rashmika’s Srivalli too replicates her previous performance as an assertive, supportive, sometimes scared wife of a powerful criminal.
Although Allu Arjun does what he does really well, the film itself ends up indulging him to the point of fan disservice.
He truly is iconic in a sequence set in the Tirupati Gangamma Jatara, a folk festival where men wear women’s clothes, often sarees, to seek blessings from the goddess. His dance for the goddess is a spectacle. Gangamma’s story is of a girl who disguised herself to kill a sexual offender and is now worshipped for it. The cool gender-bending of it all aside, Pushpa’s disguise as a goddess is for similar reasons.
Pushpa is often shown as sensitive and respectful of women. He hesitates to curse in front of women hired to dance at a party. He admires and dotes on Srivalli without infantilising or patronising her. He’s already saved her from bad guys in the first film. The saving continues in this film, of different women, from different bad men. It’s hard to say how much saving is too much saving. But Allu Arjun certainly couldn’t save this film all by himself.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.