★★★★★ Watched 18 Jun, 2023

Taking everything that is great and typical in Bollywood including the kitchen sink and blending it into a story of a bromance set to a revolutionary backdrop of India rising against the oppressive British Empire. It’s an imaginative mix of a historical setting, folklore, myth, and heighten reality pulling on viewers’ heartstrings left and right in an intentionally melodramatic way. Carrying emotions on the edge of their sleeves is another character cliché of Indian cinema tradition. 

The central dance scene is organically integrated into the story, that is to say, it doesn’t come out of nowhere like in a lot of Bollywood movies, which shows the movie was made with the international audience in mind. The rest of the scenes where the song, in a long tradition of a quire in a Greek tragedy, comments on the plot twist by literary spelling out what the audience is thinking, are action montages. If you are wondering about the long runtime, I’d say over half of the movie consists of slow-motion beauty shots highlighting Matrix-style action or heroic dramatic moments. Some of the VFX of the wild animals in action is barely passable and obviously CGI, but the rest, especially when inanimate objects are involved, are feast for the eyes. The Bollywood VFX industry has come a long way from the early crude attempts to copy Hollywood, while always adding their own unique perspective and flavor of crazy stunt ideas. 

Admittedly I’m not a big fan of Bollywood’s tendency to apply melodrama and crazy group dance scenes to basically every genre, to appeal to the widest possible domestic audience, but from time to time I’ll watch and thoroughly enjoy an extravaganza that is RRR.

P.S. Knowing Ray Stevenson unexpectedly passed away last month made watching his scenes unexpectedly emotional for me.

Source: Letterboxd
Info: IMDb