Sampath Nandi’s Bengal Tiger looks like it’s a hero movie about a hero movie. The trailer opens with – ‘if there has to be four pages about ‘us’ on Google, we have to do something at least!’ Hero arrives. To ram in the significance of the moment, Ravi Teja puts on dark glasses. And in case that’s not enough, a voice obligingly tells us, ‘it’s the hero’s entrance, whistle guys!’ If you put the Mission Impossible theme song in exaggerated slow motion, you would probably get this theme music. Stock music courtesy Thaman. Actor sways in a red shirt. Slowly. Cut to the heroine who emerges smiling coyly from – where else? A flower garden of course!
One heroine describes her expectations for her future husband. He has to be famous. He has to be a celebrity. Starry eyed she is, as her voice reaches for the grandest possible description. Cut to shots of the hero being heroic. Namely, riding a motorbike towards the camera while pumping a raised fist. Yeahh!
Then he’s brought down to earth. Becoming famous, a man tells our hero, isn’t as easy as finishing a bottle in one go. What’s masculinity here? A little later a man is told to shut up because what does a man who hasn’t ‘known’ a woman for half a century, know?
Bengal Tiger promises hyperbolic comedy. If there was any doubt, the hero pointedly shooting at the floor should whisk it away. Ravi Teja has three heroines (Tamannaah, Rashi Khanna, and Aksha Pardasany) to romance and tease. And shake his red-pants clad hips at. He’s also the hero without fear. Not because he’s brave. He just hasn’t come across it before.
Remember that stupefied expression beauty contestant winners routinely have, as their hands rise to cover the partial jaw drop, until all that can be seen are ten white-gloved fingers and wide streaming eyes? It’s there in the trailer. Ravi Teja does it. Without the gloves though.
That’s the ‘Bengal Tiger’. There isn’t a gun or knife that can kill him, apparently. Spoof or insanity, the jury is out on this one.