'F3' movie review: Venkatesh, Varun shine in half-hearted comedy

F3
Telugu (Theatres)
Director: Anil Ravipudi
Cast: Venkatesh, Varun Tej, Tamannaah, Mehreen Pirzada, Sunil, Rajendra Prasad, Murali Sharma, Raghu Babu
Rating: 2.5/5

Anil Ravipudi’s sense of humor is staunchly stuck in the 90s. If it’s used as a throwback to the pre-smartphone, pre-social media era, it works wonders. But he seems to weigh the ingredients of comedy differently. The usual suspect – a large cast of characters – is an ever-present fixture, though. Probably, the only big name that’s missing from his latest caper is Brahmanandam – if the film had been coloured with his exuberant idiocy, it would have climbed a few more stairs. Vennela Kishore, however, does his best to drag the creaky and leaky parts forward.

F3, like its older sibling F2 (2019), has Venkatesh in great form. He’s silly and he knows it. He embraces his goofiness as if that’s his only source of nutrition. The other actors, mainly Varun Tej, Raghu Babu, and Sunil, rely upon their dialogues to translate the cycle of emotions they go through. Among the supporting cast, Pragathi, as the cunning mother of two women, is a hoot. But she doesn’t get to take steps of her own to achieve her goals as her character is employed to pivot around the plans made by others.

Ravipudi is aware of the fact that comedies work better when there are pairs. Venky (Venkatesh) and Varun (Tej), therefore, have sidekicks. These sidekicks are more like friends who follow their partners-in-crime wherever they go. What brings all these characters together, without a doubt, nevertheless, is quite naturally money. The two leading men aspire to earn truckloads of moolah in as little time as possible. Ravipudi must have heard somewhere that smart work trumps hard work.

But when the smart work for which Varun and Venky get involved in reaches a dead end, they go their separate ways to ideate with their respective sidekicks. These plot points get repetitive after a while, but the laughs keep coming, sometimes in waves, and sometimes in drops. The jokes are evenly distributed amongst many familiar faces, but Ravipudi stretches a lot of scenes beyond necessary. And the climactic stretch, which is primarily written and executed as a skit, doesn’t fit into the narrative.

There’s a lengthy sequence where four characters are tasked with the job of taming a bull. They can’t turn their backs and run away because they’re all trying to prove that they’re the heir of a wealthy businessman (played by Murali Sharma). It’s not a do-or-die situation. It’s more like a matter of saving face at the end of the day. So, they get ready to get attacked by a bull. The lines that precede this particularly painful event tell us that there’s going to be a feast, but all you’ll be served is a fistful of peanuts. Despite having Tamannaah in a moustache, who’s also pretending to be the businessman’s son, it won’t tickle your funny bone. Okay, I’ll put it this way – it didn’t tickle my funny bone.

What I certainly liked, though, is its brashness. It strips apart the punch lines from F2 and reconstructs them for F3. “Honey is the best” becomes “Honey is rich”. Honey (Mehreen Pirzada) isn’t really rich and she, too, struggles to make ends meet. But who can stop her from saying that? Moreover, the movie, unabashedly, adopts the template of cringe comedy by throwing all the actors in the cauldron – only Sharma stays away from making a fool of himself. He even shouts at his assistants when he smells chaos. Does that mean billionaires, or people who step into the shoes of billionaires on screen, have lost the ability to have fun?

Ravi Babu’s Allari (2002) and Curb Your Enthusiasm, created by Larry David, which belong to the same genre, have showed us that there can be plenty of pleasures in uttering awkward and shameless statements. But shamelessness needs to be the USP of the product rather than the by-product. F3 gets that partly right. And, maybe, with time, Ravipudi will make the juice worth the squeeze.