Lie (Telugu) - Review

Hanu Raghavapudi made a promising movie with Nani as Krishnagaadi veera prema gaadha. He was able to marry the rustic rural visuals with the slick and stylish thriller elements and in the end presented us a good movie. With Lie he tries something similar but with bigger scale and uber-stylish visuals.

The problem this time though is that the thriller elements are all half-baked. Every revelation will surely evoke exclamations like “Whattt!!!” “Kuch bhi!!” “You kidding right!” ....you get the picture. And that is a big no for a thriller. When you see a movie like “Now you see me” or its sequel, the twists in those are also a bit over the top too but the makers made them work by creating enough distractions, making them grand and hence unquestionable. That is completely lacking in this movie and so the twists come across as childish and silly. The dialogues are so cheesy that when you see an actor like Arjun utter them earnestly, you feel sad for him. At the very least he needed better dialogues for the role he was given.

Besides the twists, Krishnagaadi VPG had other elements like good humor, a very touching love story etc. Lie completely failed in those two. The hero and heroine thread is mawkishly superficial. The comedy threads, one with Nitin’s friend looks forced and at times vulgar while the other with Narada and Indra is half-baked.

Two things that are great in the movie are the visuals and the music. The money spent on the movie for visuals make this one of the best looking Telugu movies. The songs and bgm by Manisharma make the silliest of the twists less sillier at least while the bgm lasted.

Overall, Lie movie tries to over-achieve, for a Telugu cinema, which is a good thing, but totally fails in execution.