It would have been quite hard to imagine Allu Arjun as Stylish Star, a decade back when he debuted in Gangothri. He metamorphosed into a real style icon for Tollywood audience. And his latest release ‘Iddarmayilatho’ is an epitome of that. He looks apt for his role, dresses like a rockstar, moves well on his feet and above all he emotes near perfect.

Iddarmayilatho is a regular love-drama-revenge saga with some complications. You have a cute Indian girl, Komali (Amala Paul) who arrives in Europe to study music. Obviously, she falls for our guy, Sanju Reddi (Allu Arjun) who is a street performer. Parents of either parties accept their love. A mafia gang kills both the families as Komali captures a murder incident in her camera without her knowledge. Unfortunately for the villain, hero survives and how he avenges them is the second half. How the Mafia and Aakansha(Catherine Tresa)’s politician-father and the hero are connected is the basic plot of the movie.

The first half is a cute love story, narrated to audience as a diary study by Aakanksha. Bramhanandam as music teacher of Komali makes the first half a joy ride. His song on Western vs Classical music is good. Puri squeezes in couple of interesting scenes about one’s character with some tongue-in-cheek lines. Apart from these and a couple of candid dialogues, there is nothing much to praise Puri for in this movie. He should get rid of his bad habit of introducing comedy characters in the second half which are totally irrelevant to the script. The Ali-Bramhanandam episode does no good to the movie and above all it fails to serve its purpose: to provide comic relief in a needlessly prolonged second half. Puri has to do more than just coming up with an interesting (or should I say, irrelevant) title for the movie, if he wants to get back his heydays.

The best thing about this movie is Bunny. Next to that, I can remember couple of peppy numbers by DSP. The violin song sounds as romantic as it can get. The mass song lives up to its name ‘Top Lesipoddi’. The background score by DSP is just awful in the action sequences, the loud unnecessary video-gamish eagle screeches are totally avoidable. The action sequence in the first half, where the hero tears into the villain’s henchmen with a dead expression is impressive. The cinematographer has done a commendable job and almost all the shots in Spain look beautiful, especially the way he has captured the beauty of those two leading ladies will not go unnoticed.

A special mention about the new girl (considering her first movie went unnoticed :P) Catherine Tresa captures your attention with some senseless-silly dialogues initially and later she sizzles in every shot with her oomph factor. Going by the role, one must say Amala Paul loses out to her on glam quotient. She also makes faces, typical girl kind of and uses her two extra large eyes to maximum affect to make an impression. Most of the cast, although unnecessary, do their job well. No complaints in that regard. However, you would wish you were the editor for this movie . This is one of those movies where you wouldn’t miss much if you skip. Anywhichways – this movie is just made to forgotten, thanks to the long and boring second half.

PS:As I was made to sit through the torturous second half I repeatedly asked myself this one question. Why so much exaggeration over everything.? Why so much exaggeration in Audio release functions over some trivial things Hero/Heroine does to prepare themselves for a role? They are actors. They ought to do those. No need of exaggeration. Why so much exaggeration on an inspired script/fight/music? Why exaggeration on presentation rather than content? And why not put the same effort on making the script impeccable? If you think through you will hardly find a handful of movies in the recent few years which are genuine and deserved to be watched every second on the silver-screen. What hurts me is, as audience we ought to take the burden of raised ticket fares (Imagine the situation of NRIs who buy tickets for tens of dollars) and be treated to nonsense like this. The director when has nothing to fill in the second half just throws in some absolute rubbish to make it a regular commercial 2.5 hour movie. Puri is an expert at this..!! Remember his vulgar comedy in Nenu Na Rakshasi and other films where comedy track has nothing to do with storyline? If the director can not twine comedy track with the main story and move the story forward (Off late VV Vinayak and Sreenu Vytla have excelled in this) then he better not fill in nonsensical stuff. This is coming out of frustration of audience esp. when you expect something from Puri Jagganadh and this is what he delivers and over that the cast and crew exaggerates this shit.