Jai Lava Kusa movie review: The biggest plus of this film is Jr NTR

Jai Lava Kusa movie review: The film has a ton of pluses. Its most important and the biggest plus is its lead actor Jr NTR.

Jai Lava Kusa movie cast: Jr NTR, Raashi Khanna, Nivetha Thomas
Jai Lava Kusa movie director: KS Ravindra aka Bobby
Jai Lava Kusa movie rating: 3 stars

Many times, the audience don’t get what they were promised from the fancy trailers cut by the filmmakers with a single-minded effort to draw people to theaters. However, some movies do live up to the hype created by their trailers. Tollywood star Jr NTR’s Jai Lava Kusa is one such film that delivers on the promises that it made through its several teasers and trailers.

The film has a ton of pluses. Its most important and the biggest plus is its lead actor. Jai, Lava and Kusa (all played by Jr NTR) as children are close to each other. Jai, who has a great interest in plays, get sidelined because of his stammering problem. While Lava and Kusa become famous in their village playing lead characters of Ramayana and they start ignoring their elder brother Jai turning him into a murderous tyrant.

Jai blows up the stage during a performance of his two brothers and disappears. That accident separates the brothers and changes the course of their life. Jai grows up with an emotional scar suffered in his childhood and becomes a terrifying young man who idolises the demon-king Ravana, the primary villain of Ramayana.

For Jai, Ravana is the king whose very name invoked fear in other mortal beings. In Jai Lava Kusa, director KS Ravindra aka Bobby has not tried to retell Ramanayana from Ravana’s perspective. But he has taken a chief antagonist of the epic to create the plot and scope that could cash in on the larger-than-life onscreen image of Jr NTR.

Jai Lava Kusa movie review: Jr NTR has grown emotionally closer to Jai Lava Kusa characters.

Like Ramanayana’s Ravana, an insatiable ego makes Jai do some terrible things, including kidnapping Lava’s girlfriend Priya (Raashi Khanna) and bringing her to his ‘Lanka.’ He also hauls up his two brothers to his village to use them to serve his own personal and political agenda. As the story progress, we start to worry about the safety and well-being of Lava and Kusa. Jai becomes like a ticking bomb as we wonder when will he explode and endanger the lives of his brothers.

The interest in the film moves to the next level when Jai comes back into the narration, it is Kusa who keep the audience engaged with his antics from the beginning. He shows no morality or love for his brothers for the better part of the film. His only goal is money that can buy him required papers to settle in the United States. Lava is the most righteous among the other two. So much so that he gets exploited by everyone around him.

The entire film revolves around Jai and the emotional upset that he suffered in his childhood. The only thing he ever wanted was to be loved by his two young brothers. Being denied of this simple desire makes him a monster.

Jr NTR has excelled at performing all three roles, while effortlessly switching between Jai, Lava and Kusa showing the stark contract in their characters. Bobby has whipped up an interesting emotional drama packing it with a lot of entertaining factors that has overshadowed some logical shortcomings in the writing.