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The Telugu language Indian action epic “RRR” (short for “Rise Roar Revolt”) has returned to US theaters for an exceptional one-night-only engagement on June 1st following its initial theatrical release. Some hindsight has made it easy to guess why writer/director S.S. Rajamouli has only now broken through to Western audiences with “RRR” despite his consistent box office success. Rajamouli’s latest is an anti-colonial fable and buddy drama about the imaginary combo of two real-life freedom fighters, Komaram Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr.) and Alluri Sitarama Raju ( Ram Charan ). “RRR” is also a fine showcase for Rajamouli’s characteristic focus on maximalist action choreography, overwhelming stuntwork and pyrotechnics, and sophisticated computer graphics.

By the time he made “RRR,” Rajamouli had already developed his brand of Nationalistic self-mythologizing with some help from recurring collaborators like regular story writer (and biological father) Vijayendra Prasad and both co-leads, who previously starred in Rajamouli’s “Yamadonga” and “Magadheera,” respectively.

Set in and around Delhi in 1920, “RRR” pointedly lacks historical context so that Rajamouli and his team can transform a straight-forward rescue mission into a rallying cry for reunification and also cathartic violence. Bheem, the avenging “shepherd” of the Adivasian Gond tribe, visits Delhi to track down Malli ( Twinkle Sharma ), an innocent pre-teen who’s kidnapped from her Gondian mother by the cartoonishly evil British Governor Scott ( Ray Stevenson ) and his sadistic wife Cathy ( Alison Doody ).

Raju, a peerless Colonial police officer, befriends Bheem without realizing that they’re at cross purposes: Bheem wants to break into Scott’s fortress-like quarters to rescue Maali while Raju wants to catch the unknown “tribal” that Scott’s lackey Edward ( Edward Sonnenblick ) fears might be lurking about. Raju and Bheem immediately bond after they save an unrelated child from being crushed by a runaway train, as clear a sign as any of Rajamouli’s love for Cecil B. DeMille-style melodrama. (“Ben Hur” is an acknowledged influence for Rajamouli, as are the action/period dramas of fellow DeMille-ian Mel Gibson ).

It’s also fitting that “RRR” is Rajamouli’s big breakthrough since it's inevitably about Bheem as an inspiring symbol of quasi-traditional, boundary-trampling patriotism. Rajamouli has gotten quite good at incorporating potentially alienating elements, like his cheap-seats love of grisly violence and brash sloganeering, into his propulsive, inventive, and visually assured fight scenes and dance numbers.

Rajamouli has also already perfected the way he works with and uses his actors as part of his shock-and-awe style of melodrama. Rama Rao is ideally cast as the naively sweet-natured Bheem, whose messianic qualities are also effectively high-lit in a handful of rousing set pieces, like when a bare-chested Bheem wrestles a tiger into submission. Rama Rao’s performance isn’t the main thing, but it is the emblematic inspiration that, along with a “Passion of the Christ”-worthy scourging, understandably leads an assembly of Indian nationals to attack Scott and his bloodthirsty hambone wife in a later scene.

Likewise, Charan’s steely-eyed performance in “RRR” is limited, but strong enough to be credibly superhuman. Rajamouli knows exactly how to capture his best sides, as in an astounding opening action scene where Raju descends into a rioting mob just to subdue and apprehend one particular dissident. Rao and Charan’s bro-mantic chemistry and syncopated physicality have already made a viral success of the movie’s splashy “Naatu Naatu” musical number, but that scene’s infectiously joyful presentation is supra-human by design.

The spirit of the individual matters more than any single person in Rajamouli’s movies and “RRR” is a perfect expression of that notion. It’s also a decent reflection of Rajamouli’s fame, which Film Companion South ’s Sagar Tetali keenly suggests is “the triumph of directorial ambition over the actor-star—the triumph of a brand of storytelling over the South Indian star image.”

With “RRR,” Rajamouli repeats his preference for one nation under populist ubermenschen. Both Bheem and Raju are extraordinary men because they are, at heart, aspirational expressions of the people’s will. Their lives, their loved ones, and their relationships are all of secondary importance—check out Bollywood star Ajay Devgn ’s explosive cameo!—so it makes sense that the cast’s images and performances are also blown up to James Cameron-sized proportions.

Like Cameron, Rajamouli has earned a reputation for pushing the limits of industrialized pop cinema. In that sense, “RRR” feels simultaneously personal and gargantuan in scope. Film Comment ’s R. Emmet Sweeney is right to caution viewers regarding the towering streak of “Hindu-centric” Nationalism and characterizations at the heart of Rajamouli’s “Pan-Indian address.” Sweeney is also right to hail Rajamouli’s dazzling “technical innovation.” It’s not every day that a new Indian movie—which are typically not advertised to Western viewers beyond indigenous language speakers, and therefore largely ignored by Western outlets—is presented as an event to American theatergoers. Attend or miss out.

Available in theaters tonight, June 1st, and also streaming on Netflix.

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in The New York Times , Vanity Fair , The Village Voice, and elsewhere.

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Film credits.

187 minutes

N.T. Rama Rao Jr. as Komaram Bheem

Ram Charan as Alluri Sitarama Raju

Alia Bhatt as Sita

Ajay Devgn as Venkata Rama Raju

Ray Stevenson as Scott Buxton

Alison Doody as Cassandra Buxton

Olivia Morris as Jennifer 'Jenny' Buxton

Samuthirakani as Venkateshwarulu

Shriya Saran as Sarojini

Chatrapathi Sekhar as Jangu

Makrand Deshpande as Peddanna

S. S. Rajamouli

Writer (story)

Vijayendra Prasad
S.S. Rajamouli

Cinematographer

K.K. Senthil Kumar
Sreekar Prasad
M.M. Keeravaani

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Critic’s Pick

‘RRR’ Review: A Hero (or Two) Shall Rise

Scenes of glorious excess make the screen hum with energy in S.S. Rajamouli’s action epic set in British colonial India.

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By Nicolas Rapold

It’s not long in “RRR” before a tiger and a wolf collide midair during a brawl with one of the film’s two musclebound heroes. Scenes of glorious excess make the screen hum with energy in the latest feature from S.S. Rajamouli, the director of the “Baahubali” blockbusters.

Set in 1920s India before independence, “RRR” pairs two of the country’s biggest stars, N.T. Rama Rao Jr. (known as “Jr. NTR”) and Ram Charan, as superfriends from either side of a bloody colonial divide. A goofily gallant Jr. NTR plays Bheem, a warrior from the Gond tribe, while Charan smolders as Ram, a fearsome police officer who is underestimated by his white superiors. (The characters are inspired by two rebel heroes from the era, Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju.)

Bheem journeys to Delhi to rescue a Gond girl enslaved by the British governor and his wife, a couple of sadists. Ram has orders to identify and capture Bheem by going undercover with revolutionaries. Instead, the men unwittingly make fast friends when they save a child stranded on a river that’s on fire. (As one does.)

But their missions get inevitably entangled, and Rajamouli (who collaborated on the story with his screenwriter father, Vijayendra Prasad), stirs in an aw-shucks courtship between Bheem and the governor’s not-racist niece (Olivia Morris).

Rajamouli shoots the film’s action with hallucinogenic fervor, supercharging scenes with a shimmering brand of extended slow-motion and C.G.I. that feels less “generated” than unleashed. Here-to-there plot filler in “RRR” is instantly forgiven with each wild set-piece: Ram furiously tunneling through a hundred-strong mob outside his garrison, or the rumbling dance-off (the “Naatu Naatu” musical number) where Bheem and Ram giddily exhaust the British cads and delight the ladies.

The rousing anticolonialist battle royal concludes with one final fist-pump: an end-credit song celebrating political figures from across India.

RRR Rated PG-13 for violent sequences, some intense language and general mayhem. With subtitles. Running time: 3 hours 7 minutes. In theaters.

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‘RRR’ Review: A Magnificent Cinematic Explosion

Siddhant adlakha.

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S.S. Rajamouli ’s “ RRR ” is a dazzling work of historical fiction — emphasis on the “fiction” — that makes the moving image feel intimate and enormous all at once. A pulsating period action drama, it outshines even the director’s record-smashing “Baahubali” movies (viewers familiar with them probably won’t know what to expect here) thanks to its mix of naked sincerity, unapologetic machismo, and balls-to-the-wall action craftsmanship. The film is playing on over a thousand screens in North America, and watching it with a packed audience familiar with Telugu-language cinema is likely to yield one of the noisiest and most raucous theatrical experiences imaginable. Plenty of recent releases have been hailed as “the return of cinema” post-pandemic, but “RRR” stands apart as an unabashed return to everything that makes the cinematic experience great, all at once.

To talk about the film in any meaningful sense — especially for unfamiliar viewers — first requires setting the stage. Its title is a backronym that stands for “Rise, Roar, Revolt” in English (and similar phrases in various other Indian languages), a fitting label for its early 20th century story about a pair of Indian anti-colonial revolutionaries. However, “RRR” started out as the film’s working title. It stood for director Rajamouli, and the film’s two renowned Tollywood stars, Ram Charan and N.T. Rama Rao Jr. (or N.T.R. Jr.), whose first on-screen collaboration is a good enough reason for many people to buy tickets. The title stuck. The high-caliber names involved are the main attraction, something that becomes all too clear when each actor first appears, and adoring fans turn darkened multiplex screens into lively spaces of celebration, whose walls echo with hoots, hollers and wolf whistles.

The film is worth this reaction, too.

Charan and N.T.R Jr. play Alluri Sitarama Raju (or simply Ram in the film) and Komaram Bheem, a pair of freedom fighters who, as far as anyone knows, never actually met. However, Rajamouli and his co-scribes — story writer K. V. Vijayendra Prasad and dialogue writer Sai Madhav Burra — imagine a fictitious friendship between the pair, during a period in the early 1920s where historical documentation of both figures happens to be scant. “RRR” takes that mild coincidence and turns it into a boisterous, melodramatic saga filled with action that’s over-the-top in its staging, but grounded in its emotional reality.

Charan’s Ram is introduced first, in a manner that’s as viscerally enjoyable as it is narratively shocking. In a strange inversion of history (though one that no doubt establishes a distinct trajectory for his character), we meet this fictitious version of the revolutionary when he’s a police officer for the British Empire. He leaps into battle against a sea of righteous Indian protesters and takes on hundreds of them at once, a superhuman feat typical of South Indian action stars, but one that Rajamouli anchors to tangible bruises, blood and broken bones, blending ludicrous staging (via wide shots that feel like baroque tableaus) with piercing close-ups that rarely cut away as the action plays out. All the while, Ram remains fearlessly and obsessively dedicated to the Crown, and it’s hard not to cheer him on despite this ugly setup — especially when he doesn’t receive the requisite thanks from his British superiors and takes out his frustrations by reducing a punching bag to sandy pulp.

Before long, Ram — now undercover as a revolutionary in the hopes of a big police promotion — is set on a collision course with N.T.R. Jr.’s kindly and heroic Bheem, whose own introduction plays like a fever dream. After a young girl from Bheem’s forest tribe, the Gond, is kidnapped by a British aristocrat, he sets a mysterious plan in motion that involves capturing a number of wild animals (a setup whose payoff is magnificently unexpected). We first meet Bheem as he sprints through the forest — Rajamouli and cinematographer K. K. Senthil Kumar charge towards him with their camera, making his movements feel limitless — and when he manages to capture a roaring tiger in a net, he roars back in its face, accessing something primal and animalistic, as the camera zeroes in on his quivering veins and muscles.

Both men are, in a strictly narrative sense, straight — Ram has a fiancé back home; Bheem has a bit of a will-they-won’t-they with an English woman, Jenny (Olivia Morris) — but everything about the way they’re captured and the way they interact drips with an unapologetic homoeroticism that forms the film’s emotional core. The duo, unaware of each other’s true identities as a cop and revolutionary, first become friends in a scene of explosive heroism that involves a bike, a horse, a train, and both men swinging off a bridge, but the beat that feels most colossal amidst the mayhem is an intimate close up in which they clasp hands, a moment so enormous that it yanks the film’s title onto the screen about 40 minutes in (who would’ve thought “RRR” would have something in common with “Drive My Car”?)

Charan is suave as Ram, and he guides N.T.R. Jr.’s more awkward Bheem through romantic advances with Jenny (a dynamic made hilarious thanks to their linguistic barrier), but the two leading men constantly wrestle between several emotional layers. Each one has their own secret mission — Ram hopes to suss out a revolutionary leader who he doesn’t realize is Bheem; Bheem hopes to make his way into a Governor’s mansion to rescue the kidnapped girl — but the duo’s close friendship also begins to infect their respective missions, especially when they’re forced to confront the truth about one another. They have broader ideals for which they fight, but their senses of duty, which they each see as altruistic, soon become complicated by their love for each as individuals.

It may not be hard to predict the plot, at least in its broad strokes — it’s filled with coincidences, and with misunderstandings which are eventually clarified — but each emotional moment along the way is both magnified to the maximum, yet rooted in the kind of devastating sincerity that makes the duo’s eventual, inevitable collision almost difficult to watch. “RRR” is the kind of film where violence and music aren’t just layered atop the story, but intrinsically woven into the way it’s told. Every action beat has meaning, either in the way it’s set up — a brief moment from the duo’s friendship montage, in which Ram sits atop Bheem’s shoulders, later returns in stunning fashion — or in the way it enhances the narrative. A moment of betrayal, for instance, is marked by a flaming carriage wheel coming undone and striking one of the characters in the heart, and it’s only about the tenth or fifteenth wildest thing that happens in that entire set piece.

For every story beat told through action, there’s another expressed through M. M. Keeravani’s music. The themes composed for Ram, especially when he’s in uniform, arrive with terrifying western horns, which blare whenever he jumps into action, while Bheem’s compositions feel more Earthy, creating a connection between him and nature through spiritual vocal chants and more traditional wooden instruments. As the duo’s friendship grows deeper, the lines between these kinds of compositions begin to blur. The film may not have many dance sequences, but the one major number — “ Naatu Naatu ,” which went viral several months ago for the way Ram and Bheem dance energetically arm-in-arm — becomes its own euphoric mini-movie about friendship and revolution, with its own subplot running throughout the choreography. Modern Hollywood blockbusters tend to have one or two standout scenes, but nearly every scene of “RRR” feels like it could be somebody’s favorite, so even its gargantuan 188 minute running time feels like a breeze.

Of course, the Hollywood influence on “RRR” is clear from the outset, as is the case with many Indian blockbusters, but the film is also its own unique beast. While it evokes images of superhero movies, American war films, and even films about chattel slavery, it blends them together in transformative fashion, hyper-charging each image until it pushes up against the line of believability, but is swiftly yanked back into a familiar emotional realm by recognizable performances. Hollywood star Ray Stevenson plays a moustache-twirling British officer, Governor Scott, who initially comes off as cartoonishly evil — so much so that he doesn’t even want to waste precious English bullets on “brown rubbish” — yet the film not only sticks with that cartoonishness until it feels familiar, but even expands on his strange philosophy until it becomes inextricable from the plot. That Stevenson (and even Bollywood stars Alia Bhatt and Ajay Devgn, who appear in supporting roles) feel like also-rans in the face of Ram Charan and N.T.R. Jr. is a testament to just how massive this collaboration feels — there’s really no western equivalent — and Rajamouli captures every moment and every interaction with the requisite scale and adoration.

By the time the film reaches its fiery climax, one filled with jaw-dropping imagery, it imbues both men with a sense of holy mythicism. Ram even ends up molded in the visage of his namesake, Lord Rama from Hindu scripture, wielding a bow and arrow in the face of British firearms, but no matter how ridiculously any of these moments read on paper, they fit perfectly with the film’s emotional reality, in which love and righteousness flow through the characters like electric superpowers, allowing them to achieve extraordinary, face-melting feats that will leave even the most hardened and cynical viewers feeling childishly giddy.

“RRR” is now playing in theaters.

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Did you know

Trivia Alluri Sita Ramaraju and Komaram Bheem were freedom fighters of India who didn't meet in real life. This film is completely fictitious and based on an idea of what if those two met.
Goofs Brazil, but not Belize, is marked as part of the British Empire in the large map on the meeting hall. Brazil was never a colony, protectorate or a client state of the UK, unlike Belize.

Komaram Bheem : Your friendship is more valuable than this life, brother. I'll die with pride.

Crazy credits The title doesn't appear on screen until 40 minutes into the movie.
Alternate versions The Hindi version released on Netflix has some changes made to it. The title card mentioning "Rise Roar Revolt" has been translated to English, the intermission has been removed, the ending song and end credits are played separately, and the overall film is presented in an open matte format, as opposed to the theatrical version.
Connections Featured in Vishal Mishra & Rahul Sipligunj: Naacho Naacho (2021)
Soundtracks Dosti (Telugu) Lyrics by Sirivennela Seetharama Sastry Music by M.M. Keeravani Vocals by Hemachandra Vedala

User reviews 1.7K

andrewchristianjr
Jun 5, 2022
How long is RRR? Powered by Alexa
March 25, 2022 (United States)
Official site (Japan)
Official Twitter
صعود ودوي وثورة
Ramoji Film city, Hyderabad, India (Film city)
DVV Entertainment
See more company credits at IMDbPro
₹3,500,000,000 (estimated)
$15,156,051
Mar 27, 2022
$166,611,197

Technical specs

Runtime 3 hours 7 minutes
Dolby Atmos
IMAX 6-Track

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RRR Reviews

RRR is one action crescendo after another, never dull but not exhausting either.

Full Review | Sep 19, 2023

SS Rajamouli delivers his most complete, his most Rajamouli film yet...

Full Review | Sep 12, 2023

What a blast of filmmaking, talent, & across the board insanity. Emotional, riveting, hilarious, action packed, & flat out just one of the most entertaining films I’ve seen this year. So over the top I couldn’t stop watching

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

There are complications and coincidences at work. That is the heart and soul of this great adventure laden with fantasy.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Mar 24, 2023

One of 2022's 20 best films.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 13, 2023

In a movie that also includes Bheem battling a tiger with his bare hands and an aerial rescue involving a motorcycle, “Naatu Naatu” may be the most impressive action sequence.

Full Review | Mar 10, 2023

It's not just about men transitioning from ignorant to enlightened, sad to happy, or anti-hero to hero. It's about humans morphing into fable, history turning into heavens and hells – and life transforming into visual literature.

...goosebumps raising, whiste-worthy, crazy, insane. Did I say outrageous?

The bonanza with a cast of what looks to be thousands and a storyline about getting back at colonizers is a blast throughout its 3-hour-plus running time.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 2, 2023

This big epic action movie reminds me of some of those Fast and Furious movies because of the really outlandish action sequences, but this film has the added attraction of Bollywood style musical numbers and a showy dance off.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jan 27, 2023

... A show that escapes realist drama at every turn. [Fulll review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 27, 2023

Between the stunts, the music, and the acting, you don't want to miss this fantastical spectacle of an adventure. It's cinema at its finest!

Full Review | Jan 22, 2023

One of the beset films of 2022, RRR stands as a gateway into South Asian cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jan 17, 2023

There are many twists as this beast punches its way through three long hours, but it moves so beautifully and is so frequently astonishing that it's well worth a look.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 13, 2023

We critics occasionally forget that one of the main purposes of cinema is to entertain, impress, and have the audience simply have fun watching. “RRR” reminds us just that.

Full Review | Original Score: 7 | Jan 2, 2023

...has just about everything in it—colonialism, revolution, mateship, a massive cast, insane stunts, amazing costumes and sets, and lots of music and dance.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Jan 2, 2023

It taps into many of the basic emotional centers that have always made movies of this sort popular and, in the process, offers hope that there may still be room for non-IP epics to exist side-by-side with Hollywood’s overbranded franchises.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 31, 2022

RRR was amazing… No other word can describe it! The stunts, story, choreography, music, it was pure cinema. Oh my goodness. A MUST WATCH!

Full Review | Original Score: 9.5/10 | Dec 29, 2022

What's most amazing is that all these genres and tones fit so seamlessly together to tell one powerful story.

Full Review | Dec 27, 2022

Employing vibrant creativity to add shine to the legend of two important revolutionary figures from his own country, S.S. Rajamouli packed every emotional and artistic fiber he could to move his audience.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 25, 2022

‘RRR’ Review: Telugu Cinema Superstars N.T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan Shine in a Splendidly Exciting Epic

Roaring tigers, flaming arrows and revolutionary fervor are on display in director S.S. Rajamouli's audacious action-adventure.

By Joe Leydon

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Straight out of Tollywood: “ RRR ,” a bigger-than-life and bolder-than-mainstream action-adventure epic, is performing mightily in international release as audiences marvel at its spectacle, embrace its emotions, and sway to its music while being repeatedly gobsmacked by its unfettered audacity. Propelled by the Telugu Cinema triumvirate of superstars N.T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan and director S.S. Rajamouli — whose combined names are one reason for the triple-consonant title — the movie is such an irresistible and intoxicating celebration of cinematic excess that even after 187 minutes (including intermission or, as the title card announces, “InteRRRval”), you are left exhilarated, not exhausted. Which, truth to tell, is hard to say about certain comic-book movies from two major extended universes.

Mind you, the two protagonists here aren’t supposed to be superheroes. In fact, they are flesh-and-blood humans out of Indian history: Komaram Bheem, a revolutionary leader and guerrilla fighter from the Gond tribe during the British Raj; and Alluri Sitarama Raju, a similarly inclined insurgent who often led his under-equipped followers during raids on police stations to acquire firearms. There is no record of these two men ever meeting in real life. But hey, when have filmmakers ever allowed facts to get in the way of an exciting story? There also isn’t any record of their possessing any abilities more superhuman than cunning and charisma. But Rajamouli doesn’t let that bother him, either.

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In the 1920s world according to “RRR” — which also stands for “Rise, Roar, Revolt,” when the full title finally makes its first appearance on screen — Raju, referenced here as Ram, is a fiercely determined firebrand from Andhra Pradesh who goes undercover as a member of the British army in the hope of arming his compatriots. Early on, he demonstrates his faux loyalty to the Crown — and more or less establishes his superhumanity — by singlehandedly punching, kicking, beating and otherwise manhandling what appear to be thousands of protesters to seize a guy who tossed a rock at a portrait in a police outpost. In most action movies, this sequence would satisfy as a rousingly over-the-top climax. In “RRR,” however, it’s nothing more than a curtain-raiser.

In the Adilabad forest, the working-class-heroic Bheem establishes his own preternatural bona fides while outrunning a wolf in order to lead the beast into a trap. Unfortunately, the wolf is taken out of the equation by a tiger, who proceeds to chase Bheem. Fortunately, Bheem is more than a match for the big cat, even when the trap doesn’t quite work. The tiger roars. Bheem roars back. And if you are fortunate enough to see “RRR” in a theater, as it is meant to be, the next roar you hear will be that of a cheering audience.

The fuse is lit for an explosive meeting of these exceptional men when the British governor Scott Buxton (Ray Stevenson) and his crueler-than-Cruella wife Catherine (Alison Doody) go slumming in a Gond village — accompanied, of course, by a contingent of heavily armed soldiers. Catherine is enchanted by a little girl named Malli (Twinkle Sharma), and claims the child as an amusing plaything to entertain guests in their palatial Delhi home. This doesn’t go over well with the child’s mother — or anyone else in the village, for that matter — but Buxton has enough muscle power to enforce his wife’s whim of iron. He doesn’t have anyone shot only because he doesn’t want to waste expensive bullets on “brown rubbish.”

At this point, you may be tempted to shout rude things at the screen. But don’t fear: Bheem vows to journey to Delhi and, with the aid of simpatico locals, retrieve Malli. It doesn’t take long for word of Bheem’s impending arrival to reach British authorities — and it takes even less time for Ram to volunteer to find and arrest the potential troublemaker. But fate (along with the shamelessly contrived scenario by Rajamouli and co-writers Sai Madhav Burra and K.V. Vijayendra Prasad) tosses both men a curve when each sees a boy trapped in a Delhi river while flaming railroad cars drop into the water around him. Both men rush to a conveniently located bridge — Ram on horseback, Bheem on a motorcycle — and improvise a rescue detailed in another jaw-dropping action set piece.

And all of this happens in the film’s first 40 minutes.

It would be unfair to spill more beans and spoil any fun by providing additional plot details or scene descriptions. (Just wait until you see what Bheem does with a truckload of nonhuman disruptors.) Suffice it to say that Bheem and Ram develop a deep friendship without either knowing the other’s true identity or grand designs, and they greatly enjoy each other’s company until they don’t, and then they do again. There are two splendiferously spirited song-and-dance sequence where the guys delight in their bromance, and they play like fever dreams of Stanley Donen directing an action-movie remake of “Singin’ in the Rain.”

Widely known as Jr NTR, N.T. Rama Rao Jr. is effective and empathy-grabbing as a seemingly ordinary man who achieves the extraordinary while evolving into an iconic hero. (He also gets a few laughs, especially during Bheem’s shy yet stealthy romance of a British beauty sweetly played by Olivia Morris.) Better yet, he has sensational chemistry with the more conventionally dashing Ram Charan. It may be overstating the case to suggest Charan carries himself with the authority and assurance of a deity — that is, when he’s not physically or emotionally anguished — but when Ram “borrows” the bow and arrow from a statue of Lord Rama, it seems less an act of sacrilege than an example of professional courtesy.

Echoes of John Woo abound in “RRR” as themes of loyalty, betrayal, and mutable identity are recurrently sounded, providing a powerful anchor of seriousness and mortal stakes during the most fantastical fights, flights and feats of derring-do. Occasionally your mind may tell you, “This is absurd!” Each time that happens, though, your heart will reply, “So what? Give me more!”

Reviewed at Regal Edwards Greenway Grand Palace, Houston, April 1, 2022. Running time: 187 MIN.

Production: (India) A Sarigama Cinemas release (U.S.) of a DVV Entertainment production. Producer: D.V.V. Danayya.
Crew: Director: S. S. Rajamouli. Screenplay: S. S. Rajamouli, Sai Madhav Burra, from a story by K.V. Vijayendra Prasad. Camera: K.K. Senthil Kumar. Editor: A. Sreekar Prasad. Music: M.M. Keeravani.
With: N.T. Rama Rao Jr., Ram Charan, Ajay Devgn, Alia Bhatt, Shriya Saran, Samuthirakani, Samuthirakani, Olivia Morris, Ray Stevenson, Alison Doody, Twinkle Sharma. (Telugu, English dialogue)

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‘RRR’: Review

By Tara Judah 2022-04-08T09:12:00+01:00

S.S. Rajamouli smashes records with his big-screen spectacular

Source: Media House Global

Dir/scr: S.S. Rajamouli. India. 2022. 180 mins.

When it comes to spectacle, S.S. Rajamouli delivers. And then some. His latest action-packed audience-pleasing adventure epic RRR has smashed numerous box office records and helped revive cinema-going, especially for the domestic market. Riotous good fun from start to finish, RRR , a fictionalised account of two real-life revolutionaries fighting against the British Raj and Nizam of Hyderabad in 1920s India is being deservedly championed for reminding audiences what big screen entertainment is all about.

Big, bold and bombastic, this is big screen entertainment at its best.

The second most expensive Indian film ever made, with a budget of $72 million (second only to 2018’s 2.0 which came in at $75 million), with the highest opening day collection by an Indian film ($31m), RRR has also just taken the mantel as the fifth highest grossing Indian film of all time (at the time of writing it has taken $99m at the global box office, with $65m of that from its opening weekend, and admissions continue to climb). Yet perhaps RRR was a sure thing given Rajamouli’s previous success with his Baahubali films; Baahubali: The Beginning (which took more than $100m globally) and Baahubali 2: The Conclusion (which took $254m globally), and his two big star lead actors, N.T. Rama Rao Jr, grandson to Telugu actor politician N.T. Rama Rao, and Ram Charan, both of whom are multi award-winning performers. But what is most remarkable about RRR , however, is its deeply affecting tone.

N.T. Rama Rao Jr. (aka Jr. NTR) plays the kind-hearted Komaram Bheem, revolutionary of the Gond tribes, while Ram Charan is Alluri Sitarama Raju, who waged armed revolution against British colonial rule. The similarities to their real-life counterparts are slight, with Rajamouli’s epic imagining what might have happened if the pair had met during the undocumented periods in their lives before their fights for India’s independence truly took hold.

The film begins in the Adilabad Forest, with the first ‘R’ accounted for – Sto R y – where a young girl, Malli (Twinkle Sharma) is taken from her mother at the behest of the British governor’s wife, who thinks the young girl’s henna artistry and charming nightingale song would make her an ideal addition to the mantelpiece. This is the narrative act that will later put everything in motion for Bheem.

The second ‘R’ comes from Fi R e, where we are first introduced to Raju (Charan), who will do anything to get a promotion – including a single-handed fight sequence that defies the odds and probably gravity just to prove his indomitable spirit, otherworldly strengths and oddly aligned allegiance to the crown. Set on the outskirts of Delhi, where riots are being led by Lala Lajpat Rai, Raju must do more than just ‘hold the line’ if he wants to get noticed. The action sequence that follows is nothing short of incredible, with Raju emerging as a jaw-dropping physical force to be reckoned with. This chapter also includes what must be the most impressive literal crowd scene (populated by people, not CGI) since Ben Hur.

Finally – although at less than an hour into the 180-minute epic – the third ‘R’ is revealed – Wate R – which properly introduces Bheem, presented as the “shepherd” of the Gond tribes, on a mission (undercover as Akhtar) to retrieve the lost lamb Malli and return her to her mother, family and village. But Bheem is soon surpassing what might be reasonable expectations of a shepherd: wearing extremely short shorts, with dramatically dripping blood running down his face and upper torso, Bheem takes on a wolf and a tiger – both of which move in decidedly marvellous and unexpected ways, with all the animals in this production being computer generated.

The central conflict comes from the British wanting Bheem captured and Raju being the man to do the job. But plot becomes secondary in this over-the-top action adventure, where fantastically choreographed set pieces – including a human pyramid of colossal proportions that not only seems to defy physics but that also has a touch of the Busby Berkeley about it – take centre stage. RRR’s set pieces, which are matched only by the utterly charismatic performances of its two leads (who, for all of their earth-defiant fighting might as well be literal superheroes) give every instalment of the Marvel multiverse a run for their money.

The film’s early domestic success comes just as two of India’s biggest cinema chains, PVR Cinemas and Inox Leisure, merged to form a mega-circuit of 1,546 screens, and already RRR has had a significant impact in drawing domestic audiences away from smaller screens and into potential post-Pandemic recovery. (Although box office notched an impressive $515.5m in 2021 – an increase of 56% on 2020 – it is still at just 37% of where it was at before Covid hit.)

It’s no surprise. Composer M.M. Keeravani has crafted incredibly catchy tunes, which Rajamouli chooses to repeat like a heartbeat throughout, making the final crescendo even more satisfying. A Sreeker Prasad’s editing is so dynamic that the whole thing - at three hours, and with an intermission – feels like it flies by in an instant. For all of its historical absurdity – realism is nowhere to be seen here – there is no denying that Rajamouli has delivered exactly what audiences want: big, bold and bombastic, this is cinema entertainment at its best.

Production companies: DVV Entertainment

International Sales: Phars Film, [email protected]

Producer: D.V.V. Danayya

Cinematography: Senthil Kumar

Editing: A. Sreeker Prasad

Production design: Sabu Cyril

Music: M.M. Keeravani

Main cast: N.T. Rama Rao Jr., Ram Charan, Ajay Devgn, Alia Bhatt, Olivia Morris, Shriya Saran, Ray Stevenson, Alison Doody, Edward Sonnenblick

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RRR: a delirious epic of Tollywood mythmaking

Its antagonists may be pantomime caricatures and its heroes superhuman, but there’s no denying the exuberance coursing through the dilated veins of this spectacular historical epic.

14 December 2022

By Sam Wigley

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Sensible objections mount up while watching RRR , but Tollywood director S.S. Rajamouli has a gift for batting them away like few filmmakers working on this scale today. His maximalist, mythopoeic 182-minute tale of the tortured bromance between two alpha males embroiled in India’s fight for independence is certainly bloated and nationalistic. Its 1920s Raj-era British characters never rise above bland romance or boo-hiss caricatures. Playing one Governor Buxton and his wife, respectively, Marvel’s Ray Stevenson and Indiana Jones veteran Alison Doody relish such plummy sadism as “There’s hardly any blood. Hit him harder!”

But that casting callback to Spielberg’s event-movie heyday is your best clue to the storytelling confidence and showmanship with which Rajamouli unfurls this epic of nationhood. As with his two-film ancient-India saga Bahubali (2015/2017), RRR – ‘Rise! Roar! Revolt!’ – is a spectacle aimed at big rooms, a money-on-the-screen CGI -enabled action fantasy whose hyperreal violence is reminiscent of role-playing video games or the ‘heroic bloodshed’ mode of John Woo. When, in deep cover as an officer in the Indian Imperial Police, Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan) does solo battle against a vast crowd that’s gathered to protest Buxton’s casual abduction of a village girl, or when a ram-raiding truckload of wild beasts is unleashed as a Trojan horse of ferocious chaos at the governor’s ball, Rajamouli’s digital manipulations seem to bend space and time, while – crucially – still obeying their rules. As tigers leap and motorbikes are swung, the speed is modulated within the carnage of any given shot, slowing the heartbeat of the action before letting its pulse skip back to normal. It creates a hyper-presentness in the turmoil of the moment. Everything has a giddying digital elasticity.

In lockstep with this visual delirium, RRR ’s priapic mythmaking around its leonine male leads risks being too much. As Rajamouli imagines a fictional friendship between these two historical figures – Raju and the contemporaneous revolutionary leader Komaram Bheem – he also deifies them with extra-human abilities, including preternatural strength, even an apparent ability to breathe underwater. But in place of the grinding self-seriousness of the western superhero picture, RRR boasts a kind of Olympian exuberance running through both its action and its musical sequences. One song gives a knowing, Greek chorus-style comment on the budding friendship, while the hyperventilating ‘Naatu Naatu’ number – filmed at the Mariinskyi Palace in Ukraine mere months before the Russian invasion – sees the duo hypnotically out-dancing a gathering of British stuffed-shirts.

Rajamouli himself joins in the dancing in the closing sequence, just after the rubber stamp motif that full-stops all of his movies appears in the top right of the screen. “An S.S. Rajamouli film”, it certifies, and boy do we know it.

► RRR is available to stream on Netflix now.

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If the detailed social realism of the Dardenne brothers represents one kind of cinema, RRR is its polar opposite. S.S. Rajamouli’s three-hour-plus epic is a riot of outrageous spectacle, gravity-defying stunts, colour, song and dance, big emotions and a menagerie of CG animals. It feels like the kind of film that looks great in a clip on Twitter but is disappointing when you sit down and watch the whole thing. But have no fear — RRR (it stands for “Rise! Roar! Revolt!”) is a big, gaudy, sledgehammer-subtle slice of escapist cinema that is fun from first frame to last.

Set in 1920s India, the plot, as it is, pits soldier Alluri Sitarama Raju (Ram Charan) and villager Komaram Bheem (N.T. Rama Rao Jr) against the British Empire, represented by Governor Scott Buxton (Ray Stevenson, terrible) and his even more vindictive wife Catherine (Alison Doody, who wields a particularly nasty whip as a reminder of her Indiana Jones days), after the Brits kidnap Bheem’s kid sister. Raju and Bheem are introduced in fantastic fashion — the former performing an in-camera version of The Matrix Reloaded ’s ‘burly brawl’ to apprehend a wrong’un, the latter outrunning a wolf and then shouting down a tiger — and then come together to save a little boy in a river on fire (don’t ask) using a motorcycle, a horse, a rope and a ridiculous feat of timing that puts Spider-Man bridge-rescues to shame. This is all in the first half hour.

RRR never runs out of steam — the dust-ups of the final jungle battle feel as fresh as the opening scene.

From here, the inventiveness and originality of the action escalates to giddy levels, often completely oblivious to the laws of physics. The quality of the VFX is variable but it doesn’t matter, partly because Rajamouli has got such a great eye for brazen movie heroics and partly because it has so much spirit it is easy to be carried along (to wit, there is a fantastic set-piece as Raju batters Brit stooges while being hoisted aloft on Bheem’s shoulders).

In-between the fighting there are heavy-handed, John Woo-esque thematics (loyalty, brotherhood, identity), low comedy as Bheem tries to woo English rose Jenny (Olivia Morris), and catchy musical numbers — the best of the bunch being a dance-off as Raju and Bheem show the stiff shirts of the Raj how it’s done. The plotting is creaky and the writing ham-fisted (“Take the special forces and nail the bastards”), but it wins the day thanks to Rajamouli’s bravura, the infectious charisma of Charan and Rama Rao Jr, ace filmmaking talent (M.M. Keeravani’s huge score, A. Sreeker Prasad’s propulsive editing) and the imagination of the stunt team. RRR never runs out of steam — the dust-ups of the final jungle battle feel as fresh as the opening scene — meaning that 185 minutes run by in the blink of a digital tiger’s eye.

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Wrestling tigers and hurling motorcycles: how SS Rajamouli’s RRR cast a spell over the world

The Indian director was as surprised as anyone that his astonishingly larger than life, logic-defying action film has found a huge global audience. So is Hollywood on the horizon?

L ooking at the box-office numbers when RRR first opened in the US in March, director SS Rajamouli couldn’t believe the film was really breaking through to non-Indian audiences. “We thought, OK, this might be [American] friends who the Indians had dragged along to see the movie,” he says. “But as the numbers started increasing, and appreciation started coming from celebrities, critics, influencers, gamers, from people of repute, I think it gradually dawned on us that this had the capacity to become much bigger than any other Indian film that has gone before.”

Everything about RRR – the story of two freedom fighters in British-ruled 1920s India – is larger than life. Not just because of the box-office numbers (it is currently the third-highest grossing film ever in India; Rajamouli’s 2017 action film Baahubali 2 is the highest), the budget (at $69m, India’s most expensive film ever) or the length of the shoot (320 days over three years, with Covid interruptions), but also the epic tenor of the movie’s action. Men wrestle tigers and hurl motorcycles, entire armies are single-handedly subdued, the dance scenes are supercharged. Stylised, CGI-heavy, logic-defying, yet ingeniously choreographed and meticulously composed, it feels like something fresh and invigorating, especially compared to Hollywood’s samey output.

“I see many films where action is not giving the impact that it is supposed to give,” says Rajamouli. “I see them doing fantastic action sequences, but for me, what is lacking is the emotional drive. Why is that action sequence happening?” Emotion and action go hand in hand for him, he says. In person he is gentle, calm and softly spoken; far from the model of macho masculinity of his films. “I just love the human body,” he says. “It’s a fantastic machine created by nature and it can do so many wonderful things.”

Rajamouli works in a collaborative way, but when it comes to getting what he wants, he can be a bit of a dictator, he admits. “All through the production, I constantly worry about whether I’m getting certain images on to the screen in the right way, in the perfect way, where I’m able to communicate my emotions to the audience the way I’m feeling it. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to get it right.”

Director SS Rajamouli on the set of RRR.

In one astonishing scene, for example, our hero Bheem (NT Rama Rao Jr) ambushes a British party by smashing a truck through the palace gates and leaping out of the back accompanied by a menagerie of angry tigers, stags and other wild beasts. It took 45 nights to film, Rajamouli explains, with 2,000 extras, including children, in period costume, plus fighters, stuntmen, fire, water. The animals were all CGI, but that added extra difficulties since actors had to react to things that were not there. Just one shot from that scene, where Bheem is framed by a broken fountain whose dancing hoses spray water like snakes, took his art department 10 days to work out.

Film-making seems an obvious career path for Rajamouli in retrospect. He grew up devouring movies, western as well as Indian – not least action epics such as Gladiator, Braveheart and Ben-Hur (he has watched the chariot race “hundreds of times”). And he was part of an extended family that entered into the movie industry in Chennai. It wasn’t quite so straightforward, though: “I was a good for nothing boy in the family,” he says. “My father used to constantly ask me, ‘What do you want to do with your life?’ I absolutely had no idea. And because all of the family was into film, I said, ‘I’ll become a director.’ I had no idea what a director does.”

He started as a junior assistant editor. “My first job was just putting labels on the cans. I was not even allowed to touch the film.” But he would listen to the conversations of the film-makers when they took a break outside the editing room. By 2001 he was directing his first movie, Student No 1 – and the scale and success of his work has been increasing ever since.

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RRR’s anti-colonial narrative and somewhat cartoonish depiction of the British as sadistic, moustache-twirling villains has raised some objections, but Rajamouli has no axe to grind, he insists: “There is no historical accuracy. At the beginning of the film we have a big disclaimer saying: ‘This is a completely fictional story.’ If you’re saying that the British are portrayed as villains, I would say the villains who are portrayed in the film happen to be British.”

He is similarly balanced when it comes to Britain’s legacy in India. “It is stupid to expect all the officers were gods or benevolent people but at the same time, it is also stupid to think all of them were monsters out to torture and kill people.” He cites the East India Company official CP Brown, who, in the 19th century, created the first Telugu-language dictionary. “He literally saved my language from extinction,” says Rajamouli. “In many libraries, you’ll see statues of CP Brown; we worship him like a god.”

With awards season upon us, Rajamouli is still on the RRR rollercoaster. In the US he has brushed shoulders with his Hollywood heroes, such as JJ Abrams, Peter Weir and Michael J Fox. “I’m quite a shy person. I just stand at the back.” Inevitably the question of working in the US has arisen, and he doesn’t rule it out: “There are many, many things that I can learn from Hollywood, its efficiency, its lean working mechanism. We are trying to figure out a way I can collaborate.”

Whether he likes it or not, Rajamouli is now a global film-maker rather than simply an Indian one, but he’s trying not to over-analyse what made RRR work. “Without changing my thinking process, the film appealed to western audiences,” he says. “So if I try to change something, then I don’t know whether I’ll be appealing to western audiences, and whether I’ll be appealing to my Indian audience as well.” Inevitably, there are plans for an RRR sequel. He recently had a “great idea” about how to continue the story, he says. It almost feels like a responsibility. “It’s a reciprocation of love for the fans and audiences who love this film.”

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Rajamouli’s success with his previous Baahubali series and RRR ’s starry cast – led by Ram Charan and Jr NTR (aka N. T. Rama Rao Jr ), with megastars Ajay Devgn and Alia Bhatt in supporting roles — meant that the Indian audience was expecting great things this time round. Nobody will be disappointed.

From the first scene, when we see a young “tribal” girl stolen from her mother to become the British governor’s wife’s plaything, we are in a heady world of good versus evil. In the next scene we see Alluri Sitirama Raju (Charan), an officer in the British army, tear through a surging crowd of seemingly tens of thousands to bring down one miscreant. Time and again, he is pulled down, beaten and rises to return to the chase. As the crowd disperses, beaten and dispirited, the one British officer with a lick of sense tells his nervous subordinate that while the angry masses were unnerving, he was much more scared of their own native recruit. Quite right, old chap. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

After that, RRR is one action crescendo after another, never dull but not exhausting either; there are plenty of scenes of Raju’s burgeoning bromance with Komaram Bheem (NTR), a similarly invincible knight come from the forest to find the missing girl, to give cheerful respite. Mostly, however, it’s all about cracking heads and derring-do.

RRR wastes no time on nuance; it doesn’t give a second’s credence to the lingering British belief that theirs was a benevolent kind of colonialism. Governor Scott is an ogre who tells his men not to waste good British bullets on these brown scum when they can easily beat their brains out; his bloodthirsty wife looks capable of poisoning 10 Snow Whites before breakfast. The officers are vain wimps; the men brutes. As for the railways, Britain’s much-vaunted legacy to Empire, the only train in RRR , catches fire on a bridge and collapses into the river that is the people’s livelihood. Nice one, Britain.

That said, there is an interesting undercurrent of intersectionality at the Governor’s garden party (shot in Ukraine, incidentally) where all the ladies are very taken with our heroes and want to give their kind of dancing a go, much to the chagrin of their men. There is even a flicker of romance between Bheem and the Governor’s niece, who lends the revolutionaries a crucial hand when needed. This scene lasts no more than a few seconds, however; RRR is very much about men. That’s an opportunity missed. Even Alia Bhatt, as Raju’s stalwart fiancée Seetha, is barely there.

A serious question emerges, however, between the thrills, whippings, beatings and the happy scenes of boyish togetherness that punctuate them. It is the old chestnut of means and ends. How many innocent people constitute legitimate collateral damage in the fight for freedom? Would you kill your best friend? Should you be capable of that? Maybe if soldiers killed both your parents in front of you when you were a child, you would be — but is that a righteous fury or just another wound? It is a question both heroes must ask themselves, both in the course of battle and its aftermath.

In real life, neither of these revolutionary heroes would live to see their battle won. There is, however, a harbinger of a better future. In the last speaking scene — there is another song and dance to come, of course, in which Bhatt finally joins the boys for some Busby Berkley-style kaleidoscopic swirling — the forest-dweller Bheem announces his new goal: to learn to read and write. Bheem did, in fact, learn to read and write in English, Urdu and Hindi, but RRR makes no claim to documentary truth. The myth is what matters, right down to Raju’s ultimate transformation into Lord Rama, shooting down the enemy with his divinely unerring bow and arrow. But do you want the truth, or something beautiful? RRR ’s vision is a far cry from the bitter realities of Narendra Modi’s India, but it makes a truly great story.

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What Netflix’s RRR gets wrong about the British Raj

The vogue for facile anti-imperialism is far from innocent.

19 July 2022, 12:05pm

Robert Tombs

Netflix is promoting a new pseudo-historical blockbuster. RRR , which stands for Rise, Roar, Revolt , is an Indian film which has been playing to packed houses at home. Those expecting the usual Indian crowd-pleaser featuring magic, romance, stiff-upper-lip male heroism, and improbably gory violence will not be disappointed. RRR is set in the 1920s, when India was still in the British empire. The villains are British. No surprises there. But the portrayal of the two main British characters, ‘Governor Scott’ and his wife, is unusually nasty and at the same time amazingly silly.

Among other incidents, the Scotts kidnap an Indian child and try to murder the mother. Hapless Indians are brutally tortured by assorted Brits. To portray British officials and soldiers roaming the country casually committing crimes is a sign of absolute ignorance or of deliberate dishonesty. The Indian civil service – the highest ranks of the administration – were regarded as an incorruptible elite, highly selected and dedicated to their jobs. In any case, in the 1920s, many of them were Indians: in 1929, there were only 894 British officials in the ICS. So viewers of RRR will have to imagine Indian colleagues and indeed Indian superiors sitting back and allowing rogue Brits to commit murder.

Netflix should be ashamed for promoting it

If similar films were made slandering other nations, they would be regarded as crudely racist. Imagine a film showing twentieth-century Nigerian rulers as cannibals, or Hindu politicians burning widows alive. But we can’t imagine such films, because they would not be made. Yet the British have long been fair game. Usually, we shrug this off. We have played such an important role in the world over the last few centuries that we have accumulated enemies as well as friends. In many nationalist myths, we are cast in the role of villains. It’s a way that quite a few countries make up heroic stories about themselves.

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But that is no reason why we should accept these stories as true, or start apologising for things that did not happen.

That is not to say that there is nothing to regret. Almost every conversation about the British Raj sooner or later mentions the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, when a squad mainly of Gurkhas commanded by a British officer opened fire on an illegal demonstration. Several hundred people were killed. Yet this was regarded at the time as a unique and shocking atrocity. Churchill condemned it in parliament. The officer responsible was sacked. But priests of the Golden Temple in Amritsar (the holiest Sikh shrine) thought he had done the right thing, and made him an honorary Sikh.

I have stood on the spot where the massacre took place, with feelings readers might easily imagine. Some young Indian men came up to me. I was expecting at least a reproachful comment. But they just wanted to say hello and practise their English. I mention this because hardly any British person who has been to India – and I have been half a dozen times to as many different regions – can have experienced hostility arising from the memory of British rule. Usually the opposite is true. I know Indians whose parents or grandparents held office under the Raj. Indeed, in the 1920s, when this film is set, India was mostly run by Indians, under fairly distant British supervision. The distinguished Indian writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri (whose father was a nationalistic city official) recalled that he had never met or even seen an Englishman during his childhood, until a British inspector came to his school and presented him with a paintbox.

So films like RRR do not reveal some hidden truth about the past, nor do they express genuine popular feeling. They try to stir up synthetic emotions. Their main purpose, of course, is to entertain and make money. So should we just laugh, and even enjoy the melodrama? Perhaps. But although absurdly unbelievable, we know that nowadays people will swallow almost anything bad about the British empire. Doubtless many viewers in a range of countries will regard this as just as accurate as the most serious academic study. British adolescents will watch it too. Perhaps it will be discussed in schools as a piece of historical evidence.

But the worst result will be in India. RRR panders to the reactionary and violent Hindu nationalism that is coming to dominate Indian culture and politics, fanned by the Modi government. Those who suffer from this are not the British, but Indian minorities, above all Muslim but Christian too, and indeed any liberals who stand up against extremism, persecution and bigotry. In reality, RRR does not record the nastiness of 1920s British rule, but it does reflect the growing nastiness of today’s India. Netflix should be ashamed for promoting it.

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Bollywood & Indian Cinema

Two legendary revolutionaries venture away from home and start fighting for their country in this Indian epic set in the 1920s.

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RRR | Ratings & Reviews

The stunts are next level, the action superbly choreographed, the emotional tenor set at a fever pitch, the cinematography and editing simply electrifying: imagine if Baz Luhrmann directed Braveheart .

Rotten Tomatoes® rating

Audience score rating.

"Stands apart as an unabashed return to everything that makes the cinematic experience great, all at once."

"The movie is such an irresistible and intoxicating celebration of cinematic excess that even after 187 minutes, you are left exhilarated, not exhausted."

"Scenes of glorious excess make the screen hum with energy in the latest feature from S.S. Rajamouli, the director of the “Baahubali” blockbusters."

RRR | Details

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What is RRR? The epic action movie that has fans buzzing

RRR is the sleeper hit of 2022, but what is it?

There have been plenty of 2022 new movies audiences have fallen in love with, from Everything Everywhere All at Once to Top Gun: Maverick , but there’s another movie that is slowly being discovered as a delight for movie fans everywhere, RRR .

RRR is an epic historical fiction action movie from India set during British colonization in the 1920s that also features a number of incredible music and dance sequences. If that sounds like a lot, it is. But as many fans can attest, it’s a lot in the best way possible.

The movie comes from director S.S. Rajamouli and stars N.T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan as real-life revolutionaries Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju. RRR brings together these historical figures who never actually met and crafts an original story about the spirit of revolution that would help lead to India’s independence from Britain. Ajay Devgn, Alia Bhatt, Olivia Morris, Shriya Saran, Alison Doody and Ray Stevenson make up other key members of the cast.

Watch the trailer right here:

RRR was released in India and other parts of the world, including the US, on March 25. Since then it has become India’s fourth highest-grossing movie of all time, while amassing nearly $100 million worldwide, including more than $11 million in the US. The movie found an ever wider audience when it released on Netflix in May. Since its debut on the streaming service it has amassed almost 60 million viewing hours and has been in the top 10 of non-English language movies for nine straight weeks.

The movie has become popular enough that it even got a billboard ad in New York’s Times Square.

#RRRMovie and #NTR30 Billboard at Marriot Marquis in #NewYork, #USA #Bheem #NTRGoesGlobal@tarak9999 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/aGMa1tsQQW July 19, 2022

That’s the big picture. If you want to know more about RRR before checking it out, we’ve got answers for some of the biggest questions you may have.

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What does RRR stand for?

The title RRR is an acronym for "Roudram Ranam Rudhiram" in Telugu and "Rise Roar Revolt" in English. The movie uses each word as a title card when it introduces the main characters of Bheem and Raju, as well as the main plot revolving around their friendship amid India’s hope for revolution.

Is RRR a Bollywood movie?

Bollywood is the most famous movie genre to come out of India, but not all Indian movies are Bollywood movies. Though RRR has big musical numbers that are often associated with Bollywood, it actually is best classified as a Tollywood movie, the genre ascribed to Indian movies that are primarily in the Telugu language.

Reviews for RRR — what the critics are saying

As of July 20, RRR has a "Certified Fresh" score of 91% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and an audience score of 94%. Empire Magazine called the movie "a bombastic delight," while Slate described it as "maximum cinema."

Filmmakers are also singing the praises of RRR , including Joe Dante (though he mistakenly calls it a Bollywood movie), Dune screenwriter Jon Spaiths and the Oscar-winning director of Hair Love , Matthew A. Cherry.

American filmmaker @joe_dantepraises #RRR for depicting the ‘horrors’ of #British #colonisation, calls it the ‘best Bollywood film’ he has ever seen. #RRRMovie @ssrajamouli #Bollywood #gremlins #JoeDante @AlwaysRamCharan @aliaa08https://t.co/jZarNiGcda July 20, 2022

Holy hell, RRR. Has any movie ever packed more movie into a movie? What a ride. Still thinking about it a couple days later. pic.twitter.com/XT4YvpEQZn July 10, 2022

Love this! I believe in #RRRMovie so much. Hope it gets Oscar nominated. #TeamBheem https://t.co/4WvrQLBz2i July 18, 2022

How long is RRR?

RRR lives up to its "epic" description, as the movie has a running time of three hours and seven minutes.

What is RRR rated?

RRR does not have a US rating, though in the UK the movie was rated 15. There are some intense sequences of violence in the movie.

How to watch RRR?

RRR is available to stream on Netflix wherever the streaming service is available. You must be a Netflix subscriber to watch the movie.

Michael Balderston is a DC-based entertainment and assistant managing editor for What to Watch, who has previously written about the TV and movies with TV Technology, Awards Circuit and regional publications. Spending most of his time watching new movies at the theater or classics on TCM, some of Michael's favorite movies include Casablanca , Moulin Rouge! , Silence of the Lambs , Children of Men , One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Star Wars . On the TV side he enjoys Only Murders in the Building, Yellowstone, The Boys, Game of Thrones and is always up for a Seinfeld rerun. Follow on Letterboxd .

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Amid All The RRR Praise, Some Scathing UK Reviews: ‘Lies’, ‘Travesty Of History’, ‘Nasty’. Netizens React

Writing for the spectator, cambridge historian robert tombs said: 'rrr panders to the reactionary and violent hindu nationalism’..

RRR Movie UK Review Lies Travesty Of History Nasty Amid All RRR Praise Some Scathing UK Reviews Netizens React Amid All The RRR Praise, Some Scathing UK Reviews: ‘Lies’, ‘Travesty Of History’, ‘Nasty’. Netizens React

Four months since its theatrical release, filmmaker SS Rajamouli's blockbuster RRR has been continuing to garner praise. While the film has already achieved a cult status in India, lavish praise has been coming from international audiences too. The latest to shower applause on the Ram Charan-NT Rama Rao Junior flick is filmmaker Joe Russo, whose The Gray Man starring another South star Dhanush just released on Netflix. He called it a “well done epic”. Before Russo, there were other Marvel Cinematic Universe alums James Gunn, Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn and Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson, who had tweeted in praise of the massive hit.

RRR has become the first film from India to be nominated for Best Picture category at the Hollywood Critics Association Awards. And there are talks that it may even be sent to the Oscars as India’s official entry.

However, amid all the praise, there is a section overseas that has heavily criticised the film, mainly because of its plotline and the way the British employees in colonial India were portrayed in it.

After a July 9 report in Daily Mail quoted a historian as saying that what is shown in the movie is “a very dangerous concoction of lies”, a Cambridge professor wrote in The Spectator last week called the portrayal of certain characters "unusually nasty and at the same time amazingly silly”.

The RRR Story

RRR (Rise, Roar Revolt) is a story of two legendary revolutionaries and their fight for India in the 1920s. It’s a fictional depiction of the lives of real-life freedom fighters Komaram Bheem and Alluri Seetharama Raju. While Ram Charan plays Raju, Jr NTR portrays the role of Bheem.

The story of the film begins with Governor Scott Buxton and his wife Catherine ‘buying’ a young tribal girl against her parents’ wishes after visiting a forest area inhabited by the Gond tribe. Komaram Bheem, who is the tribe’s guardian, then travels all the way to Delhi to rescue the girl. Raju, meanwhile, serves in the Indian Imperial Police with the ultimate aim to bring down the British. While his job was to protect the Governor from Bheem, he joins him. The film showed their journey and how they together rose, roared and revolted against the British and even succeeded in the mission.

RRR also had Alia Bhatt and Ajay Devgn playing cameo roles. According to IMDb, the film loaded with VFX was made at a budget of Rs 550 crore — the most expensive film to have been made in India so far.

It has earned over Rs 1,200 crore across the world, according to boxofficeindia.com.

‘RRR Panders To The Reactionary And Violent Hindu Nationalism’

The film showed unbearable atrocities on Indians by the British, as has been depicted in all real and fictional stories of India’s struggle and uprising against the British Raj in the past.

Robert Tombs, emeritus professor in history at the University of Cambridge, however, told Daily Mail: “This film is a piece of xenophobic slander, utterly false and without historical foundation.”

He later wrote a scathing review in The Spectator. “To portray British officials and soldiers roaming the country casually committing crimes is a sign of absolute ignorance or of deliberate dishonesty.”

To buttress his argument, Tombs added: “The Indian civil service – the highest ranks of the administration – were regarded as an incorruptible elite, highly selected and dedicated to their jobs. In any case, in the 1920s, many of them were Indians: in 1929, there were only 894 British officials in the ICS.”

This, he said, meant “Indian colleagues and indeed Indian superiors sitting back and allowing rogue Brits to commit murder”.

Tombs also said while the British usually “shrug this off”, similar movies “would be regarded as crudely racist” if they slandered other nations like this.

“Imagine a film showing twentieth-century Nigerian rulers as cannibals, or Hindu politicians burning widows alive. But we can’t imagine such films, because they would not be made,” he wrote.

Robert Tombs acknowledged why the British are shown in movies in such a negative light. “We have played such an important role in the world over the last few centuries that we have accumulated enemies as well as friends. In many nationalist myths, we are cast in the role of villains. It’s a way that quite a few countries make up heroic stories about themselves.”

But, he added, that is no reason why the British should “accept these stories as true, or start apologising for things that did not happen”.

Tombs also wrote that there were indeed some regretful events that India saw during the British rule, such as the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, but the British government had acknowledged such events.

“I mention this because hardly any British person who has been to India — and I have been half a dozen times to as many different regions — can have experienced hostility arising from the memory of British rule,” he wrote. “I have stood on the spot where the massacre took place, with feelings readers might easily imagine. Some young Indian men came up to me. I was expecting at least a reproachful comment. But they just wanted to say hello and practise their English.”

Tombs wrote that India in the 1920s, when the RRR plot is set, “was mostly run by Indians, under fairly distant British supervision”.

He went on to say that films like RRR “try to stir up synthetic emotions”, and are “absurdly unbelievable”.

Tombs also sought to link the trend to the current nature of Indian politics. “RRR panders to the reactionary and violent Hindu nationalism that is coming to dominate Indian culture and politics…” he wrote, and added that it will be the Indian minorities and liberals who are suffering from this, and not the British.

He went on to say that RRR reflects “the growing nastiness of today’s India” and castigated Netflix for promoting the film.

What Others Are Saying Against RRR

Quoting critics, the July 9 article in Daily Mail said RRR “grossly mispresents history”, and twists some versions of events to present “fiction” as fact.

“The entire plot is a travesty of history,” Dr Zareer Masani, who is an expert on British colonialism, was quoted as saying. “It’s fiction presented as fact.”

He said there might have been acts of violence in the 19th century, but not in the 1920s, when the film is set.

While Netflix carries a disclaimer with the film stating that “the story is purely fictional”, Masani said it was not enough as the film “will be taken as gospel by many”, a concern Robert Tombs also shared in his review in The Spectator.

“RRR seems to combine sadism with anti-British racism and a good dollop of historical invention," the Daily Mail article quoted Cambridge historian Andrew Roberts as saying. "What you get is a very dangerous concoction of lies,” he added.

“Portraying employees of the colonial service as cartoon villains is par for the course nowadays," said Toby Young, founder of Free Speech Union. "In reality, they were almost all conscientious, highly scrupulous public servants.”

How Netizens Are Reacting To RRR Criticism

The British criticism of RRR has evidently, and unsurprisingly, not gone down well with Indians. Netizens have reacted to both the Daily Mail article and the review by Robert Tombs.

Check out some of the posts:

Robert Tombs is an absolute bigot as his racism is reflected in this article itself where he says ‘Indians came to him to practice their English’. This is why RRRs should be made, atrocities displayed and gruesomeness of Raj ought to be publicised. https://t.co/l8wd4UpYot — Ajeet Bharti (@AjeetBhartii) July 20, 2022

BritishBabu is upset that his nostalgia is being disturbed & Indians are awakening to the truth. Colonialist administration oppressed India in many ways, denying it is a crime: #Colonized What Netflix's RRR gets wrong about the British Raj | The Spectator https://t.co/5owdkCUwQO — Dr. Lavanya Vemsani Ph.D. (@ProfVemsani) July 19, 2022

“The vogue for facile anti-imperialism”, it seems. LOL. https://t.co/xtvR1pmbtE — Aniruddha Guha (@AniGuha) July 20, 2022

This clown needs a history lesson badly. Not the British version. The world version. https://t.co/FLlBrYEOQI — Rohit Ghali (@rohitghali) July 20, 2022

'A concoction of dangerous lies': Netflix slammed for film that depicts the 1920s British Raj as being 'addicted to rape and murder' Awwww .. Mirrors aren't very high in demand amongst descendants of the Empire, it seems, 'coz they show their true faces! https://t.co/kPNjxHfyGc — Harpreet (@CestMoiz) July 12, 2022

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Why RRR’s success frustrates as much as it excites me

The Tollywood blockbuster has won over global audiences, but I hope western viewers won't limit their consumption of Indian cinema to one breakout title.

Rehana Nurmahi

@Han_notsolo

A s a British Indian, I have this game that I like to play whenever a white friend tells me that they watched a really good Indian movie. The game is simple: I guess whether the film they are about to say is Lagaan or 3 Idiots. As of Summer 2022, the game has changed slightly, because now there is a third, more likely, option: RRR.

S.S. Rajamouli’s epic, bromantic, musical, period melodrama has well earned its spot in the cultural zeitgeist. With two Golden Globes, an abundance of awards from regional critics circles, and now a history-making Oscar nomination under its belt, RRR has redefined the way that Western critics talk about Indian cinema. The film was no.7 on The Guardian’s top films of 2022 list, whilst The Hollywood Reporter called it “wildly entertaining for every minute of its three-hour-plus running time” .

There is no doubt about it that the success of RRR is utterly monumental, for both makers and fans of Indian cinema. Each new round of critics’ circle nominations would see people referring to it as a snub every time that RRR was missing from a list. Viral clips have circulated of audience members in US cinemas getting up and dancing along to “Naatu Naatu”. There is a fondness and appeal to this film that has transcended the usual audiences of Tollywood (the nickname given to Telugu cinema) to become a global phenomenon.

I am not the first writer of Indian origin to note that this global success is completely unprecedented. In fact, even the team behind the film have expressed that they are unsure as to why this is the one that has crossed over. Upon watching the film last summer, I was certainly left somewhat confused. Not, as expected, by the sheer enormity of its ridiculous concepts or their maximalist execution. Rather, I was confused by the fact that this film – whilst as epic and fun as everyone says – felt like very standard fare for Indian commercial cinema.

From the way it had been talked about in the West, I was led to believe that this would be a divergent piece of filmmaking that defied the tropes of Indian cinema. Instead, I was presented with a 3-hour blockbuster that reinforced and epitomised everything that I already loved about the nation’s films. And yet, despite this embodiment, Western praise of the film has continued to talk about it as an exception to the rule, rather than as a glaring neon sign to watch more Indian cinema. As the conversation and acclaim surrounding RRR have grown, as has my frustration at the way in which it’s discussed.

When Parasite won its host of awards at the start of 2020, there was immediately a boom in Western consumption of Korean cinema . Shows like Squid Game were able to gain the recognition and status that it did, in part because of the fact audiences were already familiar with, and partial to, the sensibilities of Korean filmmaking. It was also seen in film fans’ (and critics’) eagerness to seek out Bong Joon-ho’s previous work, as well as the work of similar Korean filmmakers. In contrast, the conversation around RRR has felt more limited: rather than opening a door, it feels as if the film is blocking the doorway, with audiences unable to look past it, instead fixating on what is in front of them currently.

In their review of the film, Empire heralded RRR as “a riot of outrageous spectacle, gravity-defying stunts, colour, song and dance, big emotion and a menagerie of CG animals.” Aside from that final element, every single factor has been present throughout the history of Indian cinema. There are the elaborate and vibrant musical numbers from Bollywood films such as Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge; the intense stunt choreography of Rajamouli’s previous Baahubali movies; the tear-jerking emotion of Devdas . Aside from these more vague characteristics, even the more specific story beats of RRR tread familiar territory.

The depth of brotherly love was explored in Sholay while Lagaan previously explored relations with colonialism, although that film used a cricket match rather than a dance battle to demonstrate the tension. Malayalam film Drishyam demonstrated the extreme lengths Indian men will go to for their loved ones. RRR is everything that it is, because of Rajamouli’s reverence for a national cinematic identity that is an amalgamation of all these things. While it is exciting to see audiences heart-eyed at this specific type of filmmaking, I wish that they were able to revere where it comes from in the same way its director does.

The frustration is exacerbated by wider conversations about Indian cinema in the Western cultural canon – mainly in the fact that there has never truly been a place for it. RRR marks the first time that an original song from an Indian feature film has been nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars, despite the fact that the majority of Indian features contain songs. In the Best Foreign Language Film category, only three films from India have ever been nominated: Mother India (1957), Salaam Bombay! (1989), and Lagaan (2002).

Only one Indian film currently sits on the Sight and Sound Greatest 100 Films of All Time, and that is Pather Panchali. In fact, The Apu Trilogy and the further works of Satyajit Ray , are often the only Indian films seen as critically significant. It is telling that Ray’s work is more eurocentric in style, deriving from Italian neorealist pictures like Bicycle Thieves, and this is what the West considers truly great.

It is true that part of this may come from the separation of high and low art, particularly in the critical space. Throughout history, blockbusters and more commercially popular cinema have fared worse in awards season than cinema deemed more serious and dramatic. This would exclude a significant chunk of Indian cinema. However, this year has marked a case for these films in awards conversations, with both Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water earning Best Picture Nominations. Additionally, with such widespread love for RRR, maybe a time has finally come for Indian blockbusters to find their way onto Western audiences’ radars (Pathaan is currently playing in UK cinemas, by the way).

However, it still saddens me that I am yet to see Western critics who loved RRR delve into exploring the cinematic history that birthed it. If a film like this, whose musical diversions, unrealistic CGI, and melodramatic narrative tendencies can be accepted with open arms, I see no reason why the thousands of films to set this precedent, should not receive the same warmth.

Alongside my fellow Indians, I am 100% rooting for “Naatu Naatu” on Oscars night. I also, however, sit with bated breath, hoping that its potential win will not just be a success story for S.S. Rajamouli, but a gateway for English-speaking audiences into the delight, audacity, and vivacity of Indian cinema.

Published 13 Feb 2023

Tags: Indian Cinema RRR

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RRR First Review: Ram Charan Steals the Show; Jr NTR Gives Award-Worthy Performance in Rajamouli Film

Curated By : Entertainment Bureau

Last Updated: March 25, 2022, 09:06 IST

RRR movie review: RRR, directed by SS Rajamouli, stars Ram Charan and Jr NTR.

The first review of RRR says that SS Rajamouli's film is a sure-shot blockbuster. Ram Charan and Jr NTR deliver terrific performances.

RRR, starring Ram Charan and Jr NTR, arrives in cinemas on Friday, March 25. While the fans have been waiting with bated breaths to watch the movie on the silver screen, we have got our hands on the first review of SS Rajamouli’s magnum opus.

Umair Sandhu, who is a member of the UK, UAE Censor Board has reviewed the film and has given it five stars. Taking to Twitter, Umair wrote, “RRR Movie Review from Censor Board. Ram Charan is in Terrific Form. He Stole the Show all the way. Deadly Combo of Jr NTR and Ram Charan. Ajay Devgn is a Surprise Package. He Nailed it. Alia Bhatt shines in her Role. She looks beautiful in RRR.” (sic)

RRR Early Reactions: Ram Charan-Jr NTR Give ‘Career-Best’ Performances in Rajamouli’s ‘Masterpiece’

#RRRMovie Review from Censor Board. #RamCharan is in Terrific Form. He Stole the Show all the way. Deadly Combo of #JrNTR & #RamCharan . #AjayDevgn is Surprise Package. He Nailed it. #AliaBhatt shines in her Role. She looks beautiful in #RRR .🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 — Umair Sandhu (@UmairSandu) March 22, 2022

He even shared some never before seen glimpses from the film on his Instagram stories. Umair Sandhu has heaped praises on the male lead of the film Jr NTR and Ram Charan.

The film critic seems to be in awe of the film as he wrote on his Instagram Stories, “RRR makes you proud that an Indian filmmaker dared to dream big and accomplished it. It is definitely not to be missed. Call it a blockbuster today but tomorrow it will be remembered as a classic. Ram Charan and Jr NTR gave their best performances. What a deadly combo! Ajay Devgn is a surprise package.”

He even shared that the movie has an unexpected climax. Umer tweeted, “RRR Movie Climax will SHOCK you. 2nd Half is the USP of the movie. Jr NTR and Ram Charan deserve Standing Ovation in RRR.”

#RRRMovie Climax will SHOCK you.2nd Half is the " USP" of movie. 🔥 #JrNTR & #RamCharan deserves Standing Ovation in #RRR .⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ pic.twitter.com/ztV2RtgMdc — Umair Sandhu (@UmairSandu) March 24, 2022

Recently, SS Rajamouli talked about Ram Charan and Jr NTR for casting for RRR and mentioned that their acting skills were perfectly fit for the roles. “Their stardom, personalities, and acting abilities made them the right fit for the parts. The most significant aspect is the camaraderie and friendship they have. They had known each other before RRR. Ramaraju appears calm throughout the flick. Charan has the same personality,” he said.

D. V. V. Danayya of DVV Entertainments produces the Telugu-language historical action drama film, which will be released on March 25, 2022. Interestingly, S.S Rajamouli’s RRR is the first Indian film to be released in Dolby Cinema.

Aside from major stars Ram Charan and Jr. NTR, the film has Ajay Devgn, Alia Bhatt, and Olivia Morris playing crucial roles, while Samuthirakani, Ray Stevenson, and Alia Doody will play supporting characters.

PEN Studios’ Jayanti Lal Gada has acquired theatre distribution rights in North India, as well as international electronic rights in all languages. The film will be distributed in the North Territory by Pen Marudhar.

While the film will now be released on March 25, its Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada versions will be available on ZEE5. It will also be streamed on Netflix too in Hindi, Portuguese, Korean, Turkish, and Spanish.

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RRR movie review & film summary (2022)
With "RRR," Rajamouli repeats his preference for one nation under populist ubermenschen. Both Bheem and Raju are extraordinary men because they are, at heart, aspirational expressions of the people's will. Their lives, their loved ones, and their relationships are all of secondary importance—check out Bollywood star Ajay Devgn 's ...
Best films of 2022 in the UK: No 7
Nothing about RRR is small: the size of the crowd scenes, the scale of the battles, the sadistic villainy of the British, the three-hour running time. It was the most expensive Indian movie ever ...
RRR
RRR is a gift. Go see it. Rated 5/5 Stars • Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/23/23 Full Review G This is a very entertaining movie! It has it all, the history, the action, the sorrow, the laughter, and ...
'RRR' Review: A Hero (or Two) Shall Rise
Ram Charan in "RRR.". DVV Entertainment. Rajamouli shoots the film's action with hallucinogenic fervor, supercharging scenes with a shimmering brand of extended slow-motion and C.G.I. that ...
Oscar nominee RRR: Why the Indian action spectacle is charming ...
In India, cinema as a medium has become extremely politicised, says writer and film critic Sowmya Rajendran. So RRR's appropriation of two real-life activists who fought for tribal rights and ...
'RRR' Review: A Magnificent Cinematic Explosion
March 26, 2022 3:30 pm. "RRR". DVV Entertainment. S.S. Rajamouli 's " RRR " is a dazzling work of historical fiction — emphasis on the "fiction" — that makes the moving image feel ...
RRR (Netflix) Movie Review
RRR (Netflix) Movie Review. Rise. Roar. Revolt. by Tom Davies Jul 25, 2022. Review Discussion (66) Movies & TV Review. 66. 4K UHD (Ultra HD) Dolby Atmos; High Dynamic Range (HDR) RRR Movie. ... What's new on UK streaming services for February 2023. By Andy Bassett; Published Jan 24, 2023; Netflix's paid password sharing rolling out more widely ...
RRR (2022)
RRR: Directed by S.S. Rajamouli. With N.T. Rama Rao Jr., Ram Charan, Ajay Devgn, Alia Bhatt. A fearless warrior on a perilous mission comes face to face with a steely cop serving British forces in this epic saga set in pre-independent India.
RRR
Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 2, 2023. This big epic action movie reminds me of some of those Fast and Furious movies because of the really outlandish action sequences, but this film has ...
'RRR' Review: A Uniquely Exhilarating Telegu Action-Adventure
In most action movies, this sequence would satisfy as a rousingly over-the-top climax. ... 'RRR' Review: Telugu Cinema Superstars N.T. Rama Rao Jr. and Ram Charan Shine in a Splendidly ...
'RRR': Review
India. 2022. 180 mins. When it comes to spectacle, S.S. Rajamouli delivers. And then some. His latest action-packed audience-pleasing adventure epic RRR has smashed numerous box office records and ...
A biryani western on bhang: RRR reopens Indian cinema in spectacular
The story is centred on a fictionalised friendship between two real-life Indian freedom fighters in the 1920s, as they take on the might of the British Raj. It features not just the two south ...
RRR review: delirious Tollywood mythmaking
It creates a hyper-presentness in the turmoil of the moment. Everything has a giddying digital elasticity. In lockstep with this visual delirium, RRR 's priapic mythmaking around its leonine male leads risks being too much. As Rajamouli imagines a fictional friendship between these two historical figures - Raju and the contemporaneous ...
RRR Review
S.S. Rajamouli's three-hour-plus epic is a riot of outrageous spectacle, gravity-defying stunts, colour, song and dance, big emotions and a menagerie of CG animals. It feels like the kind of ...
Wrestling tigers and hurling motorcycles: how SS Rajamouli's RRR cast a
L ooking at the box-office numbers when RRR first opened in the US in March, director SS Rajamouli couldn't believe the film was really breaking through to non-Indian audiences. "We thought ...
'RRR' Review: Jr NTR & Ram Charan In S.S. Rajamouli's Epic
Rajamouli's success with his previous Baahubali series and RRR 's starry cast - led by Ram Charan and Jr NTR (aka N. T. Rama Rao Jr ), with megastars Ajay Devgn and Alia Bhatt in supporting ...
What Netflix's RRR gets wrong about the British Raj
RRR, which stands for Rise, Roar, Revolt, is an Indian film which has been playing to packed houses at home. Those expecting the usual Indian crowd-pleaser featuring magic, romance, stiff-upper ...
RRR
How to watch online, stream, rent or buy RRR in the UK + release dates, reviews and trailers. Two legendary revolutionaries venture away from home and start fighting for their country in this Indian epic set in the 1920s.
What is RRR? The epic action movie that has fans buzzing
Reviews for RRR — what the critics are saying. As of July 20, RRR has a "Certified Fresh" score of 91% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and an audience score of 94%. Empire Magazine called the movie "a bombastic delight," while Slate described it as "maximum cinema."
RRR Negative review Cambridge Professor says RRR panders to Violent
RRR (Rise, Roar Revolt) is a story of two legendary revolutionaries and their fight for India in the 1920s. It's a fictional depiction of the lives of real-life freedom fighters Komaram Bheem and Alluri Seetharama Raju. While Ram Charan plays Raju, Jr NTR portrays the role of Bheem.
Why RRR's success frustrates as much as it excites me
In their review of the film, Empire heralded RRR as "a riot of outrageous spectacle, gravity-defying stunts, colour, song and dance, big emotion and a menagerie of CG animals." Aside from that final element, every single factor has been present throughout the history of Indian cinema. There are the elaborate and vibrant musical numbers from Bollywood films such as Dilwale Dulhania Le ...
RRR First Review: Ram Charan Steals the Show; Jr NTR Gives ...
While the fans have been waiting with bated breaths to watch the movie on the silver screen, we have got our hands on the first review of SS Rajamouli's magnum opus. Umair Sandhu, who is a member of the UK, UAE Censor Board has reviewed the film and has given it five stars. Taking to Twitter, Umair wrote, "RRR Movie Review from Censor Board.

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