ASN- An intricately woven heist-thriller whose flaws can be easily condoned

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The Kannada Film Industry (Sandalwood which is its popularized version) is beginning to attain its lost glory which it possessed during the era of Dr.Rajkumar, Shri. Puttana Kanagal, Dr. Shankarnag among other great personalities. Even though the industry operated out of Chennai during its heydays, there has been a lot of development and efforts have been made to reach every section of the audience.

Rakshit Shetty would definitely deserve a place in the list of people who took the industry by storm in the past decade. Starting with the critically-acclaimed Ulidavaru Kandante which showcased the Rashomon effect to the general audience, it was a no-brainer that his films would have something new and captivating. Time and again, he shows his versatility by getting into the skin of every character he plays.

With The Adventures of Srimannarayana (ASN), we can be even more confident in his script selection and choice of films. Mind you, this is one of Kannada cinema’s most ambitious projects helmed by a debutante director, Sachin Ravi. The amount of faith bestowed upon the director is immense for him and heart-warming for us.

Rakshit Shetty plays the role of Narayana (he has light traces of Jack Sparrow) who is a rogue-cop and is on a quest to find out the missing treasure in the fictional town called Amaravati (Not the one in AP). He has two huge boulders on his path in Jairam and Tukaram who are half-brothers. While these two people are fighting a secondary battle against themselves, Narayana has to find a way to the treasure and weed out the half-brothers along the way. The story has super-engaging comedy scenes which drew a lot of laughs among the audience. To crack the mystery behind the location of the treasure is a joy in itself. There’s a lot of wordplay and mythology involved in it that you would appreciate the creative team for formulating such a tricky puzzle to solve.

While this film carries an eerily similar tone to Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, it can hold its own as a truly original film. Just that the color palettes used in certain scenes and a few well-landed jokes could remind you of that cult-classic. The cinematography and the background score elevate the cinematic experience and transport you to the rustic and crude locales of Amaravati.

The plotline and narrative become narcissists at certain points in the film. It gets way too self-indulgent and doesn’t deliver the strong impact which the story could have. An increased runtime meant adding additional characters, conflicts and resolutions. While this formula of an elongated runtime can work for character-driven films like Kabir Singh, Dev D and Devdas, it becomes a bit annoying to the viewer when the film is story-driven. While I’m not complaining about the songs (because they had important montage shots to drive the story), certain scenes and conflicts could have been weeded out at the editing table.
Talking about the edit table, this film’s editing is one of the best I’ve witnessed in recent times. An article said there are about 2000 VFX shots but I couldn’t notice any of use CGI. That’s the hallmark of great VFX- You shouldn’t know that it’s CGI. Another thing that stood out is the usage of freeze frames (Err.. Martin Scorsese?) to go back in time and explain the story from the protagonist’s perspective. There are jump cuts with distinct color palettes that test your eye’s power of accommodation.

The background score might feel like Sherlock’s, the freeze frames might remind you of Martin Scorsese and the slapstick, dark humor might remind you of Quentin Tarantino but that would be only during the incipient stages of the film. After the end credits roll, you would appreciate the crew for bringing out one of the most ORIGINAL films of 2019. If you can jhelify 10-15 minutes of additional screen time, you would walk out of the theatre with a satisfaction of watching a ­paisa-vasool film

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