Random review: Baahubali

"Why did Kattappa kill Baahubali?" Mom asked me.

Oh dear lord, no.

Over the last two years, I'd seen and received enough Kattappa-Baahubali jokes (but to be honest, this one was really funny) and I just wasn't ready to hear another one. As it is, Mom keeps relentlessly sending me terrible jokes on WhatsApp. I couldn't believe that she was going to crack one in person.

Turns out it wasn't a joke.

She was genuinely curious.

"I... have no idea, Mama."

I hadn't even watched the first one to know what the hullabaloo was over. I generally don't watch epics or dubbed movies (Hey, don't judge. I watched Jurassic Park in Hindi when I was a child. When you hear something like "Bhaago, badi chhipkali aa rahi hai!" you never want to watch another dubbed movie ever again.)

"Let's go watch Baahubali 2. Then we will know why Kattappa killed Baahubali."

"Err... we could, but do you know who Kattappa and Baahubali are?"

"No."

Wow. Here was my Mom, with no idea who the heck Kattappa and Baahubali were, eager to find out the answer to the question that the nation (and other nations) wanted to know.

"I think we need to find out who they are first, so we can care about the question."

"But how?"

"YouTube."

Fortunately, we found a good print on YouTube and watched the first part. I mostly liked it, except of course, the cringe-inducing part where Baahubali Jr., transforms "warrior" Avanthika to "woman" Avanthika. Over the course of a song. And he dares to say, "You're mine so your mission is mine so you go home and chill ya, I'll go get the queen." And she instantly abandons her mission, something she'd dedicated her life to, and has the audacity to go back to her army and say, "No worries, my bae's got it. Chill ya. Oh, btw, I just met him like... 5 minutes ago." That really infuriated me, but other than that, I found it a highly watchable movie for many reasons.

So last night, now that we cared enough about the two characters, Mom and I finally embarked on a journey to find out why Kattappa killed Baahubali.

Here is a list of my random thoughts about the movie.

• Perhaps it was the fact that I was watching part 2 on a big screen -- the way such movies are meant to be watched -- but I liked it much better than the first part. The grandeur, the colours, the music, everything was stunning and delightful. It also had a lot more humour than the first one.
• It's not easy to play such-a-good-guy-that-he-cannot-be-any-gooder character without making the audience hurl, but there is something so sincere and likeable about Prabhas that he makes it work. I'd never heard of him before, and now I'm looking up his interviews. It's incredible how shy he is in real life!
• I loved Anushka Shetty in the movie, but mainly her pre-wedding avatar. In fact, when we saw the first movie, we were wondering why they cast such a young actress as the mother, but we figured she probably had a meaty flashback coming up. And we were right -- what an effect she had every time she appeared on screen! However, I did feel that she kinda became a little useless just like Tamannah did once the guy was in the picture. When they were banished from the kingdom and Baahubali was coming up with all sorts of ingenious ways to make the villagers' lives better, if only they'd shown her to have had some of the ideas, it would have been awesome.
• Mom was very agitated that the older Devasena was not doing anything while the fights were going on. "She's old na..." I suggested. "She's as old as Bhalla, and look at him go!" She countered. Fair point. But then Bhalla had continued honing his body and skills, while she had been chained, so maybe that knocked some wind out of her.
• I generally loved how regal both Anushka and Ramya Krishnan looked as the queens. They really nailed their stately characters. I couldn't believe this was the same Ramya Krishnan from that terrible SRK-starrer Chaahat. (Have you watched it? Don't.) I wonder how Sridevi would have fared as Sivagami -- she'd been offered the role first but she turned it down. As money no enough.
• The movie was loooooong. Surprisingly, I didn't mind the songs too much -- they were gorgeous -- but I did think the battles and fight scenes could have been shorter. Speaking of the fight scenes, whatta lot of blood and gore there was! Ufff.
   
• Mom was horrified that Kattappa did actually kill Baahubali. She was expecting some kind of a twist I reckon. "He really killed him???" She turned to ask me when it happened. Even Viv (he'd watched it with his cousin while he was in the US) said later that he didn't expect Kattappa to be so loyal to the throne that he'd actually kill Baahubali. It was a pretty horrifying betrayal indeed. We wondered if killing himself instead would have been a solution to his dilemma?
• I expected Aslam Khan from the first movie to make a surprise appearance in the climax, but it didn't. The scene between him and Kattappa had been quite significant and hinted at a possible re-entry so I'm not sure what happened there. But then all this coulda-woulda-shoulda is kinda unfair to the filmmakers.
• My heart was going out to the poor CGI animals. They'd all better be CGI. Were they all? The horses that kept slamming into the ground seemed very very real. If that was CGI, I hope the VFX team got a big fat paycheck.
• The stunts were amazing, and because I was so into the movie, I didn't mind all the Physics-defying stuff, but I did literally burst out laughing when the army not only propelled itself into the palace using the coconut trees, they even made mid-air sky-diving formations using their shields, before making perfect landings on their feet. It was hilarious.
• Oh, by the way, the theatre had a total of eight people including Mom and me. Three Indians and five Malays. I don't know why I expected a full theatre on a Monday 8.45 pm show.
• Why were the tickets so expensive? The weekend tickets were $18 each and the weekday tickets $15 each! We pay less than half of that for regular movies. Is this partly why the movie is the highest-grossing ever? 1000 crores in net profit apparently!
• In contrast, here are some sad numbers (and they just get progressively sadder) showing how much the actors got paid: Prabhas 25 crores, Rana Daggubati 15 crores, Tammannah 5 crores, Anushka Shetty 5 crore, Ramya Krishnan 2.5 crores, and Satyaraj 2 crores.
• So, will there be a Baahubali 3? What do you think? And will there be a Bollywood Baahubali?  BaahuBolly? I hope not. I can think of a gazillion ways in which they can screw this up.