Jilebi review: Director K Vijaya Bhaskar’s comeback vehicle is a snooze-fest

1/5

Story:

Kamal is an aimless brat who lives in a hostel with his engineering batchmates. One day, a girl Lakshmi asks Kamal for help to enter their hostel and pays him a fat sum. Lakshmi arrives in the night to avoid the public eye, but all hell breaks loose as she tries to return home. What connects Lakshmi to the hostel? How far will Kamal and his friends go to help her?

Review:

Director K Vijaya Bhaskar, famous for his comedies, family entertainers in the 2000s, returns with Jilebi, a campus-centric tale that launches his son Sree Kamal as a lead actor. While Nuvve Kavali and Classmates showed the filmmaker’s flair for the genre, Jilebi is his attempt to blend (b)romance, humour, horror and action in the backdrop of a college.

The film hinges on a wafer-thin plot - a girl enters a boys' hostel secretively and is forced to stay in the premises after her attempts at fleeing bear no fruit. She resorts to the protagonist’s help and there’s chaos. Jilebi, strangely named after the female lead’s character J Lakshmi Bharathi, has little going for it - the writing is weak, the narrative is overstretched and the comedy reeks of double entendre.

There’s no reason to invest in the pivotal characters or their issues - they’re only obsessed with sex, women, booze and a few other cheap pleasures (there’s a sequence where the men desperately wait for the girl to return from a bathroom). The motive behind her presence in a boys' hostel is equally bizarre - to give a handful to an ex who breaks up over an SMS.

One can empathise with Lakshmi’s frustration of being stuck in the company of perverts. The screenplay repetitively focuses on her struggles to escape from the hostel and delays the inevitable for trivial reasons. One wonders if she is stuck in a Tihar jail or a boys' hostel. Jumping off buildings, black magic, dressing like a man, fooling a warden - she tries every trick in the book but there’s no respite.

The rhyming one-liners are a victim of the Trivikram syndrome - sample dialogues like ‘Korukoni Covid techukunnattu’, ‘Cheppindi vini cheppulesko’, ‘Garden lo warden ni chusi..’ The needless dream songs add to the cacophony. The humour is cheap by the tall standards that the director had set for himself in the past - a warden even appreciates a student for growing ganja in a hostel.

When a story unfolds in the same location amidst limited characters and needs to hold your attention for two hours, a sharp screenplay is the bare minimum. If the first hour is mildly bearable, it’s an ordeal to sit through the post-intermission segments. The film ends rather abruptly with the male protagonist stuck in the heroine’s home - one hopes that isn’t a hint for a sequel.

Sreekamal looks handsome, dances well and the dialogue delivery is neat, but the script is such a catastrophe that it’s hard to appreciate the silver linings. Shivani Rajashekar is only asked to express irritation and disgust through her character and that’s precisely what a viewer feels about the film too. Several experienced actors like Rajendra Prasad and Murali Sharma are wasted in meaningless roles.

A generally dependable Ankith Koyya looks clueless in an insipid part while Sunny, Bumchick Babloo and Getup Srinu are equally annoying. One can’t blame Mani Sharma solely for the poor album - there’s nothing in the song situations to trigger any creative inspiration. Jilebi should’ve been a 90-minute film with a better screenplay - it’s an insult to someone of K Vijaya Bhasker’s calibre.

Verdict:

Jilebi, with its tepid execution of a thin premise, makes for tiresome viewing. There’s nothing working in favour of the film - the humour, music or the performances. Though Sree Kamal and Shivani are capable actors, they need better scripts to showcase their worth. Director K Vijaya Bhaskar, known for films like Nuvvu Naaku Nachav, Manmadhudu, delivers the biggest dud in his career.