Story

Raja (Sharwanand) falls in love with Ammu (Subrabhi) at first sight. He impresses her with his abilities. Just when she is about to accept his proposal, he inadvertently gives away a cute dog to municipality dog catchers without knowing that the dog belongs to Ammu. Rest of the story is all about how dog gets entangled in series of events and how Raja returns the dog to Ammu.

Artists Performance

Actors: A role of this nature is a cake walk for Sharwanand. It’s a pretty casual role with not much of scope for emotions and histrionics. Surabhi is alright as leading lady. Prabhas Sreenu got a lengthy role in this movie and he does justice. Saptagiri got a lengthy role and he entertains. Dhanraj gets a variety role of a steel pirate who cause all the twists in the movie. Nagineedu and Surya are okay. Urvashi’s characterization is not effective. Shakalaka Shankar has done the role of recording dancer and imitated Chiranjeevi effectively. Harish Uttaman and Supreeth are convincing. Posani Krishna Murali plays a normal character for a change.

Technical departments

Story - screenplay - direction: The variety aspect of the film is that the story revolves around a dog (liked the director’s voiceover of SriSri’s poem kukkapilla, aggipulla, sabbu billa …). He has used Vantage Point / Amores Perros kind of screenplay to narrate the story. We see this kind of screenplay used mostly for serious thrillers. Director Merlapaka Gandhi used it for a comedy film. An incident that happens in the beginning of the film affects almost all the characters of the film. The story is revealed in flashback mode bit by bit. Writing of the film is interesting. But during the execution, director couldn’t create the interest in the beginning part of the film. The middle part creates curiosity among audiences with Saptagiri dishing out entertainment regularly. But the basic emotions (love thread and father thread) takes back seat in the search of dog. The comedy of errors becomes cliched towards end.

Other departments: Dialogues are fine. Cinematography by Karthik Gattamaneni is alright. Songs scored by Praveen Lakkaraju are fine on screen. I liked Hulala and Colorful Chilaka songs. Dialogues are nice. Editing should be crisp as it appears lengthy. Production values by UV Creations are adequate as this film is shot in thriller format. Hence no excess money need to be spent for glossiness in visuals.

Analysis: Express Raja is a screenplay-based film attempted in comedy genre. The story is narrated in entertainment format with all the characters getting linked up with an incident followed by comedy of errors. Plus points of the film are Sharwanand, novel screenplay and entertainment by Saptagiri. On the flipside, the movie should have been narrated in a more interesting way. We have to wait and see how this film manages to hold up with 3 biggies around this Sankranthi.