Manmadhudu 2 Movie Review: This Nagarjuna flick is entertaining but lacks a spark.

Cast: Nagarjuna, Rakul Preet Singh, Lakshmi

Director: Rahul Ravindran

Adapted from a 2006 French film, Prete-Moi Ta Main (which means 'Rent A Wife'), the Telugu adaptation ferrets out the meaty, mirthful, relevant portions from the original and adds bits of its own, which don't always work.

Rakul Preet Singh reprises her role from her recent Hindi hit De De Pyar De. as Avantika. She is the 20-something feisty, fearless, flirtatious femme fatale whom the 40-something virgin Samba Siva Rao (Nagarjuna) hires to appease his orthodox mother and his 3 sisters(there were 4 sisters in the original.

Avantika, for her part, wants to adopt her deceased sister's kid but needs a bank balance and security - Portuguese rules, where the movie is based - to be able to do so. The rest of the tale is not hard to predict. 

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The film is a family comedy which has its moment such as the time a packet of weed gets thrown into the fireplace and the whole family is high because of the fumes.

Vennela Kishore playing Samba's employee and friend is hilarious with his trademark humor and accent. There are many funny bits in the story, but the movie runs up and down, high and dry. It gathers momentum at times but then goes flat a few moments later. All of this is largely because of the absence of subtlety in the story. 

The protagonist is shown to be emotion-less, but such a person need not be a total bore. However, Samba is. He is not a charmer like the one in Manmadhudu was, per se. It is hard to understand why women swoon over him the way they do in the movie when not much is built into his character.

On the other hand, Avantika's character has more potential; she has a wider emotional range and likability. Unfortunately, that role doesn't reach its fulfillment owing to the simple contradiction - a person needs reasons to fall in love with another. Stronger the female protagonist more is the need to invest in the character of a person you want her to fall in love with. A deviation from the cliche was expected here because a person like Avantika, who is so good with a male protagonist's family, so sure of her decisions and emotions - will also have expectations from her man. 

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Nagarjuna pulls off the child-man act with remarkable restraint. He perfectly switches from being a decent guy in front of his family but turns to be a casanova in front of women. In fact, this is the sexiest film of Nag's career. The flirtatious encounters include a hilarious sequence where Nag's best friend runs to a drugstore for condoms when his master is in the mood with a one-night stand. But Nagarjuna's character was not well-written. The movie tries to take the right approach by cracking a lot of age-related jokes. So, his role, as accused by many, is not age-inappropriate. He is just older guy women are attracted to, and who lives that kind of a loner-lifestyle. 

Overall, it is a movie that will not bore you. But, it could have been a little more. There was room for the story and characters to breathe. There was an opportunity for the movie to be a little more honest about what it wanted to convey, but couldn't convey.