"RRR" Review: How the West Was Won

It's musical numbers are the stuff of legend, but there's more to "RRR" than meets the "Naatu Naatu"

March 17, 2023

There is a moment 87 minutes into RRR where one asks themselves a peculiar question, one that, for many audiences, has never been asked before and likely never will again:

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“Did he just throw a leopard at that guy?”

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It would seem like a movie devoted to such spectacle wouldn’t be anything but a ludicrous display of insanity. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth.

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RRR is built on the unthinkable; a single man bludgeoning his way through a horde of protestors; guys tossing motorcycles at opponents; a young boy sniping the entire British Raj from behind a log. The lunacy never ends, but somehow, through three hours of absurd action sequences and superhuman heroics, it never feels ridiculous. In fact, that which would ordinarily fail instead finds enormous success.

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In 1920, at the height of Crown rule in India, Governor Scott Buxton and his wife, Catherine, visit a forest in central India, where they abduct Malli, a talented young artist. Komoram Bheem, the tribe’s protector, disguises himself and sets out to rescue her. Along the way, he crosses paths with A. Rama Raju, an officer with the Indian Imperial Police enlisted by Catherine to eliminate Bheem. The two save a young boy from a fiery train accident and strike up a close friendship, unaware of each other’s identities and intentions.

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It’s a multi-directional recipe for drama, from the rescue of a kidnapped girl to the inevitable testing of a deep, intimate bond, the inner turmoil of fighting your own people, to the secret motives one must have to act against your comrades.

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It takes little time for RRR to establish that it will earn every second of its 182-minute runtime.

In the opening scene, a British officer approaches a young mother, begging for her daughter’s return, and whacks her across the head with a fallen tree branch hard enough to kill her five times over. We don’t know precisely where the story will take us, who the players will be, or what it’s all intended to mean, but we know it will be worth our while.

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Of course, the story doesn’t take us anywhere unique, the players are not unfamiliar, and the meaning isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. It’s a tale of rescue, that of a young girl taken from her home. It’s a story of men with a powerful bond tested by outside circumstances. It’s a film about many things to which we’ve become accustomed: friendship, duty, love, honor, redemption, and throwing leopards at people.

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Thus, RRR accomplishes something Hollywood has struggled to master: offering up the familiar in a way that feels unfamiliar. Of course, we can blame ourselves for that; if we regularly ventured outside of our American bubble to sample the offerings of other countries, our amazement would get muted.

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Therein lies the beauty of a single movie, a single experience: everyone has to start somewhere. If we choose the proper starting point, we can open our eyes to things we didn’t know were possible. RRR will show anyone uninitiated to Tollywood filmmaking many things such individuals didn’t know could work on screen.

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But more than anything, it shows that Hollywood’s general insistence on minimalism doesn’t always produce the desired effect. It’s because of RRR’s lack of restraint that it hits all the notes it tries to reach. The drama doesn’t land in a way customary to Western audiences, and that’s a good thing.

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It’s time we challenge ourselves to view the overarching themes of life from another perspective. It’s time we embrace how intimate the bond between two men can be without any romantic or sexual angle exerting influence. It’s time we realize that the subtle differences in inflection that create barriers to emotional understanding between different languages are worth learning so that films like RRR can reach and affect the audience it deserves. It’s also time we examine the possibility that the greater the spectacle, the more profound the emotion.

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Isn’t that what makes life’s seminal moments feel vital? Whether falling in love, the birth of a child, a life-changing promotion, discovering a debilitating illness and overcoming it, everything that shocks us into realizing life's finality inspires the highest emotions. It forces us to reflect on how long we’ve waited, worked, tried, and toiled to reach milestones.

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It’s like ascending a mountain, reaching the peak, looking out at the view, and appreciating everything you accomplished to arrive. Movies are the same way; RRR overwhelms the senses at every turn, even in its “quieter” moments, so we frequently revel in whatever it offers. It seems easy, but it’s far from it. Mastering a film like this takes something special that few Western filmmakers possess.

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It’s about commitment, not hinting at what you want an audience to believe or thinking restraint automatically equals depth. Sure, some things need to get imparted in more subversive ways, flying below the radar to sucker-punch us at the end or maybe to ensure we embrace the message instead of feeling like the whole movie is a sermon.

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But if you can commit, anything is possible, and nothing is outrageous. People can knock out wild animals with torches, spark furious dance battles, drag around spiked whips, toss a motorcycle at someone’s head, or parkour their way through a royal palace without so much as a question. Seasoned foreign film lovers will know these elements to be inherent to Tollywood, but imagine a newcomer's perspective. All of these things should feel ludicrous, but none of them do.

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Not only do they feel natural, but it also feels like they’re each integral to the narrative and essence of the movie. All the drama lands because the surrounding visuals are so bombastic that when we get asked to enlarge our hearts, it’s not a big ask. If these men can do the impossible, they’ve earned us enjoying, embracing, and appreciating everything they do, feel, and say. The music can be as overwrought as it wants; the set pieces can be as extravagant as they wish; the tears can flood the whole of India; the romance can get just as rushed as the bromance.

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It’s a fascinating idea that Hollywood would benefit from embracing: instead of minimizing your elements to create the maximum effect, why not maximize everything to inspire the maximum effect? What if less isn't always more? What if that isn’t an overarching ideal and instead something we should sometimes avoid? It’s not melodrama or being overzealous; it’s just unbridled joy for making movies, and when we can tell a creator had the time of their life, we more easily buy what they sell.

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How many Western movies have a man set up a meet-cute for his new best friend without some acknowledgment that concern for your buddy’s love life could, in some microscopic way, get construed as homosexual? How many deliver numerous mustache-twirling villains without feeling contrived or rudimentary? How many could earn a man getting whipped over and over and over without breaking, rousing the crowd to a riot, without feeling like a cynical attempt at inspiration?

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It’s spectacle at its finest, not just because of the astonishing effects, ranging from the bevy of wild animals to the fiery battles en route to the grand finale. It’s not just the cinematography, all colorful and vibrant and focusing our gaze on everything the screen offers. It’s because the spectacle is directly responsible for the substance. RRR refuses to be bashful, constantly defying reason, logic, and even physics. The result is a movie that invokes a childlike wonder, forcing us to tap into our lost youthfulness and love it simply because it exists.