Kabzaa Movie Review: You must resist the temptation of calling Underworld Ka Kabzaa featuring Kichcha Sudeep and Upendra a sasta copy of KGF for it's not sasta at all. The production values are evidently staggering and the ambition to create this glorious mess of a film is incredible. While the former may look impressive enough to draw you to the theatre, the latter though (the sheer audacity) to make the cheap replica of a monster hit, and the intention behind it, will sap every ounce of energy out of your soul. Kabzaa is that bad. Period! You know what you have signed up for once you have taken it upon yourself to review this “KGF” genre, but the film with its mindless head-severing and blood-splashing adventures thrown in so liberally, stoops so low that it can become a standard in itself to measure how terrible can filmmakers go to churn out replicas that have worked before at the ticket windows.  Kiccha Sudeep Feels Shah Rukh Khan’s Spy Film Changed the 'Dynamics and Confidence' of People! (Watch Video)

Honestly put, I am not a KGF fan (I found Yash impressive though with his swag and style), but his film will make you sit up and take notice with its scale and the protagonists’ panache. This one, on the other hand, has only the scale and the rest is skull-crushingly boring! But then why compare the two films? Why is it not possible to view (and review) Kabzaa in isolation? The answer is simple. The makers don’t want us to. It is so obvious. The storyline, the rushing montages, the hero and the bloodbath is so damn KGF-esque that you know that Kabzaa is not a classic case of a story gone bad, but a prime example of how to make a bad film driven solely by keeping a grand ambition intact.

Watch Kabzaa Trailer:

The film is set in the pre-independence period where Akeshwara (Upendra), the son of a renowned patriot and a freedom fighter, rises in stature to become a mafia don. He is a force to reckon with and his empire knows no bounds. The man is on a mission to fight against the British, but the means he adopts to reach his goals are unheard of. Amidst heads being severed and wrists being slashed the story unfolds to narrate how the son of a freedom fighter turns violent (Violence, violence, violence! He likes it, you see!). Don’t expect Sudeep to surprise you either for what he has got is just a cameo that has no logic and serves zero purpose. In fact, none of the characters show any arc or seem to be in sync with the central plot which is solely about a righteous man turning into a monster of sorts.

The film certainly impresses you with its production value with everything thrown at you is grand. The guns are massive, the explosions are even bigger and the army of gangsters seems to be on a high on something so big that even they fail to comprehend what that exactly is. The ear-splitting background score and cacophonous tracks only add to the already heightened shrills and the melodrama that comes along. With bullets being sprayed even without lifting a finger and the bodies being squashed into pulps in every second frame, one wonders if the makers had any plot at all in the mind to execute it. Brevity is clearly not the forte of the makers ( even for that matter of the editor). As if, every disjointed sequence, so long they feature glorious gore, has been retained to heighten the mania. Entertainment News | Fans Go Crazy Spotting Rajinikanth at India Vs Australia ODI Match in Mumbai

One hopes that post Kabzaa things will change and the makers will not fall into the trap of creating what looks like farzi replica just for the sake of creating yet another KGF and expect to ride the success wave. In that sense, Kabzaa should ideally serve as the template for how not to make a gangster saga. With so much money being pumped into this project, one wonders if the makers had invested even a handful of pennies into sensible writing. The performances, the screenplay, the dialogues-Kabzaa lets you down on multiple fronts to the extent that you start feeling nauseated after a point and may see loo breaks as the only respite to get back in the dark room, hoping against hope, that the next sequence would at least be bearable. Sadly, nothing changes till the very end!

Final Word: Kabzaa is not even so bad that it can be good-just toevoke crazy laughs. It is studded with monstrosity without much meaning or entertainment!

Rating:1.0

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 17, 2023 04:28 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).