Cast: Dhruv Vikram, Banita Sandhu, Priya Anand

Directed By: Gireesaya

Adithya Varma is the second remake of Telugu Blockbuster Arjun Reddy after the Hindi remake Kabir Singh.

Arjun Reddy became a trendsetter even the remake Kabir Singh but got a fair share of criticism for its toxic masculinity and portray of a woman in the silver screen.

Dhruv Vikram is the son of Tamil star Chiyaan Vikram.

Vikram after many years of struggle got a breakthrough from the 1999 film Sethu which gave the actor a national award for his performance. In that too Vikram was an obsessive lover who gone insane in love. The theme of the film became a formula that sadly always worked in films.

To encash this formula Vikram tried to launch his son in Arjun Reddy's remake version Adithya Varma which was previously made by Sethu's director Bala in the name Varma so that Dhruv too gets a breakthrough like his father but things didn't go well and Bala was sacked from the film which he made in his own terms without caring about the original film.

Producers replaced him with Gireesaya who was the assistant director of Sandeep reddy Vanga who was the director of the original film Arjun Reddy and the remake Kabir Singh.

Also Read: Pagalpanti Movie Review: A senseless comedy that has nothing new to offer.

So it was simple to retain the scenes from the original even the theme background music of the character.

But Adithya Varma lacks the soul of the original. It just looks like a copy-paste version of the Telugu remake. If you have seen the original will know what is you to come to the film. Despite all the criticism the makers didn't think about it and retained all the scenes which were labeled has problematic. Gireesaya just played a safe game by directing similar scenes without giving his own take to the film.

The story is same the life of a brilliant doctor with anger management issues goes on a downward spiral after the love of his life gets married to another man. And our hero goes all Millenial Devdas and becomes self-destructive.

Where Arjun Reddy differs from Adithya Varma is that it was an unabashed portrayal of a man-child, whose emotions pop open like a bottle of champagne. But it is difficult to believe the man-child nature of Dhruv, who, despite having a dense baritone, comes across like a schoolkid who has been asked to internalize the protagonist of a Shakespearean play. In simpler terms, Arjun Reddy is a tough character to embody, especially for someone who is making his début. Dhruv, however, does a fairly decent job of showing the depth of the character, without diluting the Arjun Reddy-ness, which, rightfully, has become a character description of its own — the number of times Arjun Reddy is mentioned in this review shows how good Vijay Deverakonda was in arm-twisting the audience to root for him. 

But as mentioned before Dhruv has given an honest performance as this is his first movie. The most disappointing aspect of the film is its lead female lead. Banita Sandhu has given a weak performance she is not at all convincing.

Overall, this film is just the Tamil version of Arjun Reddy without being a different take to the Telugu film. I wonder what will be Bala's Varma. At least we could have seen a different film.