Liger review: Vijay Deverakonda stutters in a pan-Indian embarrassment

0.5/5

Story:

Liger and his mother pack their bags from Karimnagar and move to Mumbai, running a small-time tea stall for a living. They only have one motivation as they enter Mumbai - to groom Liger for an international MMA tournament and get him to represent India. The mother-son duo seeks the help of a senior coach in the city to gear up for the big stage. In the meanwhile, Liger is smitten by a social media influencer, Tanya. Will love come in the way of the youngster’s ambitions?

Review:

With rare exceptions like Badri or an Itlu Sravani Subrahmanyam, very few films of filmmaker Puri Jagannadh have aged well over the years. Luckily for the filmmaker in the early half of his career, he found a way to make entertaining films with his catchy dialogues, masking the apparent crassness and the problematic treatment. Though he had made the commercially successful iSmart Shankar recently, it was clear that his ideas ran out of fuel while desperately pandering to the galleries.

Liger still sticks out like a sore thumb in Puri’s career - calling this his worst film too is an understatement. He takes the audience for a ride while not even making a basic effort to tell a story or entertain. The film is a big, plain bore. The screenplay is a gargantuan mess - Puri is clueless in driving conversations in his sequences. His precise, straightforward dialogues were once his USP; in Liger, he is now a pale shadow of his past.

The rags-to-riches story is mounted without the slightest hint of authenticity. Vijay Deverakonda’s stammering is the only trace of vulnerability in the film. Contrastingly, Liger is filled with scenes where every second character takes a dig at him for the same reason. There are only two women who play a key role in Liger’s life - his mother, who constantly reminds him of his ambitions and a girlfriend who’s a mannequin-equivalent and keeps distracting him from his dreams.

Ananya Panday’s Tanya is a classic example of Puri reducing the women in his films as objects. Tanya’s pals advise her to use her physique to make a mark on Instagram and even have the gall to tell her, ‘guys check out girls from bottom to top’ and she doesn’t mind the idea at all. This is precisely how Puri visualises the female leads in most of his films and unfortunately, this doesn’t come as a surprise. Ramya Krishna keeps referring to Tanya as a devil in Liger - but the devil is the writing here.

The film pompously quotes Bruce Lee as a philosopher and places Mike Tyson as an inspirational figure in the protagonist’s life. The director mistakes mental strength to be the pitch of his characters - they constantly need to shout to garner attention, even if they don’t make any sense. In every random scene, Vijay says ‘We’re Indians’ or ‘I’m a fighter’. As a viewer though, the only fight is with your tolerance levels. Ronit Roy’s only job is to remind Liger to ‘Focus, focus and focus!!’

Liger is remotely tolerable as long as the film is set in Mumbai. Once Vijay leaves for the US, the film falls apart like a pack of cards. From music to cinematography and the patchy production design and the supposed scale, there’s no department in Liger that can even remotely distract the viewers and do some minimal damage control. The background score is painfully amateurish and the song situations are lazily designed. Most sequences are shot in Hindi and have been dubbed in Telugu later.

The stunt choreography is unimaginative, to put it mildly. In a scene, the baddies and Vijay keep slapping each other in a supposed display of their machismo. Was this supposed to be an unintentional dig at Arjun Reddy? Ali and Getup Srinu’s characters are wasted efforts to tickle your funny bones. In fact, it is Mike Tyson’s laughable cameo that makes the viewer laugh at his own plight. Chunky Pandey and Vishu Reddy are hapless even in their minimal screen time.

Vijay Deverakonda is a total misfit in Puri Jagannadh’s universe – his stuttering makes no impact at all. He solely trusted the filmmaker with this and the latter lets him down big time. One can conveniently blame Ananya Panday for the absence of any screen presence, but could any other actress have done a better job with such a one-note character? Bad films leave you with a migraine but Liger isn’t even capable of that. It’s that forgettable!

Verdict:

Liger, simply put, is a catastrophe. You had to take Vijay Deverakonda seriously when he said ‘Waat Laga Denge’. Even 15-minute short films have more to tell than what Liger has to say in over 140 minutes.