Bro review: Pawan Kalyan plays Time in a dated fantasy film

Sai Dharam Tej in Samuthirakani’s Bro, a remake of the director’s Tamil film Vinodhaya Sitham that was released directly on Zee5 in 2021. (Screen grab)

A young man burdened by familial responsibilities meets a sudden death. He begs for a second chance, believing that those who love him won’t be able to survive the tragedy. But the truth is far from his assumption. That’s the premise of Samuthirakani’s Bro, a remake of the director’s Tamil film Vinodhaya Sitham that was released directly on Zee5 in 2021. The original film was under 100 minutes, but with Pawan Kalyan in the cast, the Telugu remake (screenplay by Trivikram Srinivas) is over 2 hours long, stretched to make room for his stardom.

Sai Dharam Tej plays this beleaguered young man who is ironically named after an immortal sage, Markandeyalu. He has a mother (Rohini), two sisters (Priya Prakash Varrier and Yuva Lakshmi), a younger brother (Surya Sreenivas) and a girlfriend (Ketika Sharma) to take care of, and his constant refrain is “time ledhu” (I don’t have time). Tej plays the harried Mark with an earnestness that makes the character likeable despite his absurdly controlling nature. So, when he runs out of time and ends up meeting Titan (Pawan Kalyan), the god who controls it, his life changes.

Kalyan’s arrival as Titan is among the few moments in the film when the screenplay hits a high note. Tej, who is standing in the dark, asks if there’s no power and Kalyan, known to fans as Power Star, tells him that ‘power’ is right next to him. This sounds so laborious when written out, but it’s the kind of silly fun that Indian masala films cheerfully dish out. Close-ups of the superstar, references to his old movies, lines and songs that you won’t know unless you’ve absorbed film culture – Bro has all of it.

What’s missing, though, is good writing. None of the characters are developed properly, and some of the arcs are so dated that you want to pinch yourself and ask if you’ve accidentally walked into an '80s movie. Sample this: Mark’s sister has earned a seat with full scholarship at an American university, but she agrees to get married just to make her brother happy. For a film centred around time and its tricks, Bro is full of such archaic scenes.

The conversations between Mark and Titan are initially amusing but they quickly become repetitive. The quality of the CGI in these scenes doesn’t help matters. The second half of the film, especially, seems random, with an unnecessary fight and songs appearing out of nowhere. Now nobody is going to nitpick if such sequences are entertaining, but they’re not. They look like they were force fitted into the film after they shot all the schedules and realized that the runtime wouldn’t be long enough for a theatrical release.

The pressures Mark faces at work are a significant part of the film, but this too is diluted into subpar comedy involving Vennela Kishore as the boss. Some parts of Bro look like they were made up on the spot. For instance, Mark’s mother casually reveals that she had an older daughter called Mahalakshmi who died young. Amazingly, this is the first time that the siblings are hearing of it. But this information isn’t even placed in a meaningful way in the plot – it’s just thrown at you to justify naming another character Mahalakshmi.

The fact that Bro isn’t a well-conceived film becomes glaringly obvious with what passes for the interval block. The halfway point isn’t marked by a twist or any kind of surprise that makes you curious to watch the rest of the film, but Pawan Kalyan with a CGI-earth under his foot for no good reason.

Bro could have been an interesting commentary on how patriarchy forces men into the provider role, and how pressuring that is. It could have been a jolly film about second chances and a repressed character breaking out of his cage. The writing, however, is neither sharp nor insightful and the film ends up looking like an amateur skit.  Mark’s time runs out, and so does our patience.