‘Lifu Super’: A heist film that loses its way long before the climax

Director Vinod Kumar can't seem to decide what to focus the film on and packs in too many unnecessary elements.
‘Lifu Super’: A heist film that loses its way long before the climax
‘Lifu Super’: A heist film that loses its way long before the climax
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For a film starring newcomers and directed by a newbie director, “Lifu Super” had managed to create a fair amount of buzz for itself on social media, particularly with the release of an interesting trailer. But viewers who go in to watch the film with the expectations generated by the trailer are likely to be disappointed.

At the most basic level, “Lifu Super” is a heist film. Two down-on-their-luck young men (an aspiring actor and a journalist with a small-time Kannada tabloid) hatch a daring plan to steal crores of rupees of black money being transported from Bellary to Bengaluru to be distributed as cash for votes in upcoming elections.

The journalist (Likhit Surya) is tired of working for a pittance of Rs 4,000 per month. The aspiring actor (Niranth) finds out he can’t get his break unless he’s willing to put some money into the industry. And since it’s all black money, they reason, they would be in the clear if their plan went smoothly because their “victims” (powerful politicians and industrialists) would not dare complain to the police.

But director Vinod Kumar can’t decide just what his film is about. And so he packs in everything from romance to comedy to family drama, making the film quite confused and episodic. In particular, the sequences featuring the two women leads Meghana Appaiah and Anu Chinappa, are completely superfluous, since the women disappear from the screen soon after the interval.

And even before that, the sequences with them are too brief and perfunctory to add anything to the story. So too is a backstory about the aspiring actor wanting to become star because it was his film-crazy mother’s dream for him.

All these sequences take up too much of the film, drawing out the first half of the film for far too long. And because they’re all so briefly outlined, they each take the most predictable track, adding nothing new and interesting to the story.

The second half of the film shows a little more promise, as the film finally focuses on the heist itself. But here too the film lurches between comedy and action, diffusing the energy and pace of the second half. This could be because the actual heist itself is too simplistic to receive a proper build-up, even if it involves a heist within a heist.

What does work in the film is the music, with a fairly fun set of songs in the first half of the film, and some visually appealing sequences to go with them. While Niranth is somewhat awkward on-screen, Likhit Surya manages to hold attention to a fair extent.

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