187 min | NR | March 25, 2022 | Variance Films
Two real revolutionaries who never met become sworn brothers in British-ruled India, each hiding a war from the other. S. S. Rajamouli stages their friendship at the scale of myth and the volume of a riot. It is the most sincere blockbuster in years, and it does not apologize for a single frame of it.
RRR imagines a friendship that never happened. Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju are real anti-colonial figures from Indian history. The film places them in 1920s Delhi under British rule and invents a story in which they meet, become brothers, and never learn that each hides a secret war against the other’s purpose. One serves the colonial police. The other infiltrates the city to rescue a kidnapped girl. The film is anti-colonial myth built at the scale of religious epic, and it argues that revolution begins with two men recognizing each other.
N.T. Rama Rao Jr. plays Komaram Bheem as raw physical force with a gentle interior. He charges through fire and floodwater and then softens completely in the scenes of disguise and longing. Ram Charan plays Alluri Sitarama Raju with rigid control that masks his real allegiance. His stillness carries the film’s central deception. Ray Stevenson plays Governor Scott Buxton as casual imperial cruelty, a man who calculates the cost of a bullet against the worth of a colonized life. Alia Bhatt grounds the back half as Sita, whose patience reframes everything Raju does.
S. S. Rajamouli directs from a story by V. Vijayendra Prasad, and he builds every sequence toward physical impossibility. He stages each hero introduction as a standalone set piece, with Bheem subduing a tiger and Raju holding back a rioting crowd alone. The camera ramps into extreme slow motion at the peak of each action beat and then snaps back to speed, which turns violence into choreography and choreography into iconography. The “Naatu Naatu” number weaponizes dance as anti-colonial defiance, two Indian men out-stepping a ballroom of British aristocrats in one escalating sequence. Rajamouli treats gravity, fire, and scale as suggestions rather than limits.
RRR commits completely to its own excess. It never winks at the audience or apologizes for its sincerity. The friendship between Bheem and Raju carries real weight because the film takes the bond as seriously as the spectacle. Rajamouli understands that a story about throwing off an empire demands a form large enough to hold the fantasy. He builds that form and fills every frame of it.