Watch TrailerTiger Nageswara Rao Movie Review: As Tiger Nageswara Rao opens, we see a title card stating “ inspired by real rumours”. A sigh went up in the almost empty auditorium screening the first show of the day. And we watch Tiger’s first train robbery around Stuartpuram in the 1980s. Does it resemble the great train robbery? In a way it does, but the craftsmanship in the Telugu language movie is shoddy. As Tiger tries to empty the train of foodgrain (those were the days of food shortages), his men jumping in and out of the train look more like puppets.
Tiger played by Ravi Teja could have exhibited more of his escapes, but the work, helmed by Vamsi Krishna Naidu and Vamsi Krishna Akella, focuses on his personal life. Stuartpuram is small village nestled in the woods between Guntur and Prakasam in Andhra Pradesh, and the settlement there was established by the English officer, Harold Stuart, for a tribe branded as criminals by the British Government in 1913. Many such colonies were set up, but Stuartpuram remained the most notorious, because of Tiger. Later, he became some kind of Robin Hood, who robbed the rich and helped the poor. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the Indian Administration cracked down on these people, and gradually their identity got a transformation.
Tiger died in a police encounter in 1987, but his memory still haunts the region spawning dozens of legends, many of them merely imaginary. Many years later, films on Tiger were made in Hindi – Rowdy Rathore and Kick, for example. Unfortunately, Teja does not quite fit into the character of Tiger; he is too suave and sophisticated to play a bandit. The other characters essayed by Nasser, Anupam Kher and John Abraham look too superficial to make any impact. The entire mood of the movie gets diluted when the narrative shifts to Tiger’s love track, and the all-important sequence in which Tiger plans and executes an attack on the Prime Minister’s house begins to look wishy-washy.
I just could not understand why the film leaves behind a story on the notorious exploits of Tiger for a pretentious romance. Often, this is the key problem with Indian cinema, which loses focus and begins to wander all over the place. Eminently avoidable.
