So everyone’s like “oh, this movie is amazing, you have to see it” and I dutifully put it on my list, but ugh, it’s a big dumb action movie. I get that people love big dumb action movies, and so do I sometimes; but on the whole, it’s not really my favorite genre. So I wasn’t really rushing to watch it, but my wife had a podcast that was going to talk about it, and so here we are.

So just to put the spoiler up front: I liked it! I didn’t super-love it, but I did solidly enjoy it. And so the key thing here is that a) it’s actually about something, and b) the thing it’s about actually drives the characters’ motivations and actions in a believable way.

And look, I know that sounds like a super, super low bar to clear, but like… okay, the last MCU movie I saw was Black Panther 2. What was that about on a pure story level, what was the central conflict that drove the movie? And did it really drive the characters’ motivations in believable ways? Or the last F&F movie I saw was Fast 9 — same questions there.

In both cases, the answers are “I don’t know” and “definitely not.” But here, there are better answers to those questions. The plot makes sense and is comprehensible, giving people clearly defined goals that matter, and which drive their actions, causing the core conflicts and relationships in the movie.

Again, this is a ridiculously low bar, but it’s amazing how much better a big dumb action movie is when you understand and care about the characters, what they’re trying to do, and their relationships to each other. The big franchises have gotten incredibly lazy about this, substituting spectacle for story and hoping that your fondness for the characters from previous movies will take up the slack. But here we have a movie that remembers how to tell a story and create characters.

But of course, this isn’t a straight character drama, there’s also a lot of action, which was basically fine. The hero characters are superheroes, and can do a lot of flatly-impossible things. (I say superheroes, but really they felt like videogame characters — like, the two of them could fight scores of British soldiers, and it would be obvious that of course they’d win.) There’s a time when seeing a bunch of superhero-style fighting would have been super cool, but at this point, the action was the most banal part of the movie. Certainly not a weakness, but neither was it something that stood out to me.

Oh, in addition to the regular action, they also sing and dance a bunch, which tbh I could take or leave — the dance numbers were basically fine, but didn’t seem revelatory. But the music does bring up a point, which is the complicated language situation here.

This movie is originally filmed in Telugu, but Netflix doesn’t have the rights to that version, with just a Hindi dub and an English dub. The English version was labelled “English (Indian)” and it’s what started by default; I didn’t want to stop things and dive into a research project once the movie had started, so figured that maybe it was one of the languages the movie was originally released in as a dub, and would just be co-equal with the Hindi dub as a second-tier way to watch the movie if you don’t have the original Telugu available.

But lol no, for three reasons:

  1. It turns out that the original actors did the Hindi dub, so even if you’re not getting the language they were speaking on-screen, you’re at least getting a unified performance from the same person, whereas the English dub was done later by Netflix with different actors.

  2. They don’t translate the singing into English; I don’t know if it’s Hindi or Telugu on Netflix, but it’s definitely not English, and if you’re watching English with no subtitles, then there are no subtitles to it at all, which means you miss some dramatic points. (If you do turn on the subtitles when listening to the English track, they’re actually captions so you get that godawful caption experience with all the “[music intensifies]” and what not.)

  3. The English characters in the movie speak English, and there are multiple points in the movie where some characters can’t understand English and it’s important that you understand who can understand what, but when they do it all in English, it’s nearly incomprehensible. In one scene, a character who has been speaking fluent English the entire movie suddenly starts speaking in broken halting English for no reason — if you watch it in Hindi, it’s clear that he’s actually been speaking Hindi most of the movie and now is actually speaking English badly, but in English, it takes a minute to understand this.

So: Hindi isn’t the best way to experience the movie, but if you’re going to watch it on Netflix, it’s muuuuuuch better than watching in English. Recommended, but learn from my mistakes on the audio front.