Ever seen that adorable video of a golden retriever puppy getting distracted by everything it sees around it? Ramesh Varma’s Khiladi is the cinematic equivalent of that. Problem is that Khiladi is neither adorable nor remotely engaging. The screenplay is so all over the place, you can’t help but wonder if any of it ever made sense, at least on paper. And when even the ‘twists’, mass songs and comedic/punch dialogues it has in spades start getting repetitive – you know you’re in trouble. Mohan Gandhi (Ravi Teja) is introduced as the wanted criminal who is serving time for a crime he might or might not have committed. Pooja (Meenakshi Chaudhary) is a criminologist who wants to base her thesis on Gandhi’s case. She’s told he has killed his cute little family, consisting of his wife Chitra (Dimple Hayathi) and in-laws (Anasuya Bharadwaj, Murli Sharma). The only surviving family member of this massacre is a child who still seems fond of her supposedly murderous father. “Colour me intrigued,” goes Pooja immediately as her saviour syndrome kicks in and she will now go to any lengths to get this man out of jail. What she doesn’t know however is that there’s a much bigger game at play. Ramesh Varma tries to pull off an Abbas-Mastan with Khiladi – as in, he will fill up the film with nonsensical dialogues, plot twists that make no logical sense, beautiful women shimmying to songs, basically lots of style over substance. He hopes you will have such a ball watching Gandhi be the titular ‘khiladi’ while CBI officer Arjun Bharadwaj (Arjun Sarja), police officer Jayaram (Sachin Khedekar), Home Minister Guru Singham (Mukesh Rishi), criminals David (Thakur Anoop Singh) and Bala Singham (Nikitin Dheer) follow hot on his heels only to come up looking like clowns. Unni Mukundan is also in this tale, he plays a co-convict called Ramakrishna but the less said about his plotline the better. But none of that happens. And the core plot of all this is a container with obscene amount of money brought in from Italy that everyone is trying to locate. Meah! The film is bogged down by a bad screenplay, CGI, songs composed by Devi Sri Prasad don’t pass muster and only serve the purpose of (a) interrupting the on-going story and (b) showing off how beautiful Dimple and Meenakshi are (we already know, no need to objectify them just for that). The makeup department makes everyone's skin look bad on-screen. The interval bang is the only thing that lands as intended and as the film progresses, the run-time seems like a chore. A story like Khiladi needed defter writing, not to mention a hook point that keeps you intrigued in the first place. Even the much-hyped action sequence shot abroad is not that cool. Ravi Teja manages to bring charm to a character that hardly has any. He breezes through his role even if it’s odd (and uncomfortable) to see him romancing women who are clearly much younger than him. Dimple, Meenakshi and Anasuya get characters that give them scope to perform but the director keeps taking detours to make them belly dance in sequinned shorts or be the supportive but cool sidekick. These ladies deserved better. Rest of the cast, including Rao Ramesh and Vennela Kishore make their presence felt. And with all said and done, Khiladi needed to be as self-aware as it does in a particular action sequence at the end featuring Arjun and Gandhi. Some clever writing would’ve saved the day too. Khiladi is an absurd, sometimes stylish and oddly wacky, disengaging crime thriller – do with that what you will.Read more