Vikrant Rona, starring Kiccha Sudeep, is not your usual film even though it has all the elements of a typical commercial entertainer. Of late, many South films including Pushpa, RRR, and KGF2, have made waves with their rooted content that has appealed not just to the audience back home but also globally. The makers of Vikrant Rona have tried to do something similar by bringing a unique and a localised story to the audience, but it somewhere lacks that universal appeal.
Vikrant Rona revolves around the sudden disappearances and subsequent deaths of young children that shakes their remote village settled in the midst of a dense rainforest. Later, it is revealed that these deaths have a strange connection to a family that took their own lives 25 years ago after being wrongly accused for stealing sacred ornaments from a holy temple in the village. Soon, a dead body of the village’s Inspector is found in a well outside ‘Kamarottu Ghar,’ which the villagers claim, is haunted. However, Panna (Neetha Ashok) and Sanju (Nirup Bhandari), the new visitors in the village, refuse to believe so until one night they witness something terrifying.
Amid all this, a new inspector Vikrant Rona, played by Kiccha Sudeep, is posted in the village. He takes it upon himself to solve the mystery of the haunted ‘Kamarottu Ghar’. Without a doubt, Kiccha Sudeep elevates Anup Bhandari’s directorial a notch higher with his swag and heroic act. He is the soul of this film and perfectly cast as the rowdy inspector Vikrant Rona. The actor makes a whistle-worthy entry in the movie and continues to fire up the screen with his style till the very end.
Vikrant Rona is about Sudeep’s heroics and how he becomes the messiah of the entire village. His action sequences are super solid and are one of the major selling points of this film. Since Vikrant Rona is majorly shot indoors, it has its own shortcomings there. There’s not much you will get to see in the film in terms of locations other than a dense forest and a waterfall. The VFX of the film is decent but not as great as we have seen in recent South films.
Jacqueline Fernandez’s fans will be disappointed as the actress doesn’t have much screen time in the film. It’s basically an extended cameo which doesn’t really leave any kind of lasting impact. However, Jacqueline’s on-screen chemistry with Sudeep looks fabulous in the ‘Ra Ra Rakkamma’ song, which is already a huge hit among the audiences.
While Nirup Bhandari plays Sanju with utmost sincerity, debutante Neetha Ashok equally does justice to her role. The two are able to engage the audience with their warm screen presence. But Sudeep definitely owns this movie with his larger-than-life persona and charm.
Having said that, the story of Vikrant Rona doesn’t quite connect. Despite incorporating various comic, horror and thrilling elements, Vikrant Rona falters at several points. Not just that, the execution of the film also looks random at several places. The narrative goes overboard with avoidable and problematic humour. In the second half especially, Vikrant Rona loses grip over the plot and the story goes haywire. Things become confusing and make the viewer restless and uneasy.
Overall, Vikrant Rona is strictly for hardcore Kiccha Sudeep fans who have been waiting for this film with bated breath. The film releases in theatres today.
