Common Sense Media Review
By Barbara Shulgasser-Parker
,
based on child development research. How do we rate?
Romantic family drama has violence, language.
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Ranga Ranga Vaibhavanga
What's the Story?
In RANGA RANGA VAIBHAVANGA, two men -- Ramu and Chanti -- love each other so much that they build homes next to each other and raise their families as one. One dad's young son, Rishi (Vaushnav Tej), loves the girl next door, Radha (Ketika Sharma), but they stop speaking to each other when Rishi beats up a classmate. The beating is alarmingly vicious, suggesting a pathological temper and lack of self-control in the attacker. When Rishi and Radha end up in medical school together, they reconcile, deeply in love, with romantic montages and singing and dancing numbers to prove it. But Radha's big brother Arjun (Naveen Chandra), an up-and-coming young politician, violently defends the family honor when he learns that his sister Subha has been hiding her love for Banu, another of the sons next door. Furious that he can't hand his sister off in marriage to a friend of his choice, he runs next door and beats the daylights out of Banu. When Banu's brother Rishi retaliates and beats Arjun, Arjun demands that his family shun their dear friends next door. Rishi and Arjun remain hot-headed and violent, but Rishi at least tries to bring the families back together behind the scenes. Political corruption involving Arjun provides a complex secondary plot. Although the families try to bring peace, Arjun won't see reason and pulls a gun on Rishi. Can the families reconcile?
Is It Any Good?
Ranga Ranga Vaibhavanga is an overlong, tedious, and ridiculous tale. It's filled with shockingly vicious unprovoked violence and stupefyingly irrelevant scenes that add up to a punishing 139 minutes of your life that you'll never get back. Every sweet and decent instinct portrayed here is wiped out by violence and meandering incompetence of the director-writer. The violence is serious. A 14-year-old Rishi beats a boy severely, banging his head loudly on a desk multiple times. Arjun, a man in his 30s, learns his sister is in love with Banu, the boy next door, and runs over in a rage to beat the guy with a large piece of wood. "How dare you love my sister without my knowledge?" he cries. Rishi learns his brother has been beaten and runs over to pummel Arjun.
The movie treats this brutality as garden variety boys-will-be-boys behavior, as ordinary and acceptable as breaking spontaneously into song and dance. Perhaps an Indian audience accepts that people beat each other savagely to express displeasure. American superhero films certainly showcase such violence in the name of vanquishing supervillains, but not in the everyday, casual manner of this film. Non-Indian audiences may also struggle with multiple references to Indian culture and politics. And the comedy is singularly unfunny. A medical student upends a cadaver in anatomy class. Where's the joke? As a prank, someone sends a group text that a friend has fallen downstairs. How is that clever or funny? Lots of stilted and incomprehensible dialogue leaves us wishing the movie would end quickly and put the audience out of its misery.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about the way that parents cede their authority to a hot-headed son who demands the entire family abandon best friends just to preserve his honor. Does this seem realistic? Why, or why not?
Do you think violence is viewed differently in different parts of the world? Does the ordinariness of the way violence is presented here seem surprising? Why, or why not?
A man feels he has been dishonored because he wasn't informed that his sister was in love with someone. What does that say about a society's view of the autonomy of women?
Movie Details
- On DVD or streaming : October 1, 2022
- Cast : Vaushnav Tej , Ketika Sharma , Naveen Chandra
- Director : Gireeshaaya
- Studio : Netflix
- Genre : Drama
- Run time : 139 minutes
- MPAA rating :
- Last updated : May 22, 2024
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