Kingdom Telugu Action Thriller Film
Written and Directed by Gowtam
Tinnanuri
A Review by Vanam Jwala
Narasimha Rao
With children away and
loneliness surrounding, introduced by my son Aditya, daughters Bunti and Kinni,
we made it an infrequent routine of watching ‘Netflix’ streaming service
that offers a wide variety of TV shows, movies, documentaries etc. We however,
normally watch old or new movies, but as much time as we have patience, and whenever
we want. Many times, we watch one movie on more than one day (nights generally)
till we go to bed. The choice is random search without any criteria. Just time
pass.
One such ‘Telugu
Action Thriller Film’ that we watched recently was, Kingdom, written
and directed by Gowtam Tinnanuri, Co-produced by Naga Vamsi and Sai Soujanya
under the banners of Sithara Entertainments and Fortune Four Cinemas. Starred
by Vijay Deverakonda, Satyadev, Bhagyashri Borse among others, it seems to be intended
as the first installment of a planned duology and follows a troubled police
officer who is assigned to go undercover on a case that brings him face-to-face
with his past demons. The chain has many missing links as we proceeded to
watch.
I found myself torn
between admiration and disappointment watching the film. What I liked about the
film was its sheer ambition. Director Gowtam Tinnanuri apparently tried to
craft it as more than an ordinary action film, aimed at making it a heroic story,
that blended prison-break thrills, smuggling cartels, tribal displacement,
fractured brotherhood, betrayal, and even a touch of prophecy. The grandeur of
the visuals, the scale of the action, and Vijay Deverakonda’s ‘Atypical Body
Feature’ gave the movie an intensity that at times was bit gripping.
Certain emotional stretches, had real nostalgia. Despite the film’s sporadic strange
and ridiculous characteristics, it had the potential to serve as a symbolic
reminder that, life and hope can be born amidst violence and destruction.
The theme of Kingdom
is about dreams, ambition, loyalty, and the rise to greatness in the face of
adversity. The ‘Basic Story Theme’ is that, the principal character Suri
(Vijay Deverakonda) is compelled to face his childhood trauma and personal
failings while trying to prove himself worthy as an officer of the law. Having
grown up in a house where his mother (Rohini) had a complaint with him and a
father who was quick to abuse, Suri wanted to find his brother Siva (Satyadev),
who ran away from home when they were children. Eventually when brothers
come face to face, it became an emotional stretch. Thus, in essence, Film
Kingdom is the troubled cop's undercover mission that challenges his
identity, forging a redemption path through trauma, ambition, and survival.
The film opens with a
scene where during 1920s, in coastal British Period’s Srikakulam, a tribal
community facing brutal oppression and mass killings by British armed
personnel. However, a small tribal group escapes to a remote island near Sri
Lanka, and find protection under a typical leader destined to defend his
people, which has little rationale to comprehend. Cut… there entered Suri or
Surya, an impulsive and witty police constable haunted by childhood. After
little bit of drama, Suri who was offered a covert assignment in Sri Lanka,
infiltrates a smuggling ring in Jaffna, and under disguise as a prisoner,
enters the local jail and finally encounters his brother Siva. At every step
lots of missing links, but this is film and such missing links are but natural.
Siva does not recognize him.
Suri learns about the
smuggling league which profits through human smuggling, gold trafficking, and
violence. He incidentally discovers tribal lore about a ‘Chosen One’
someone like himself. As the film moves further, Suri and Siva cross paths in
dangerous circumstances. Their emotional reunion was depicted as intricate. A
situation arises where Suri was unable to decide whether to rescue Siva at the
cost of his mission. But what happened to Shiva is a million-dollar question.
Notwithstanding all this, film has jail breaks, fight sequences, boat chases,
and uprisings layered with tribal mythology and espionage danger-relevant or
irrelevant, contextual, or illogical. By the end, Suri’s identity, and his link
to the tribe’s protector myth, resonates. Though he did not fully rescue Siva
or dismantle the cartel, he sets a course for larger battles ahead. The
narrative leaves open threads: Siva’s fate, Suri’s transformation into the
tribe’s leader, and the looming conflicts.
Film Kingdom, perhaps is not just a film but the beginning of a
cinematic saga. It aspired to blend an action-driven prison escape drama with
the deeper undertones of tribal displacement, brotherhood, betrayal, and
redemption. At its heart lay Suri, a man shaped by violence and haunted by the
separation from his brother Siva, navigating the dark underworld of smuggling
cartels where gold, greed, and power collided. The narrative attempted to
straddle two worlds, the gritty immediacy of action and the poetic sweep of
prophecy and symbolism, while also setting up a duology not to speak of
a trilogy. In ambition, it reached for epic cinema; in execution, it
often fell short, leaving the audience caught between spectacle and
incompleteness.
What I disliked,
however, is what eventually weighed the film down: the disjointed screenplay.
The movie introduces multiple narrative threads, such as, the cartel’s gold
smuggling, the mysterious wheelchair-bound villain, his supposed son, the
suited man with spectacles, the displaced tribal prophecy, Suri and Siva’s
broken bond, and the doctor-lady’s subplot. Instead of tying them into a
coherent whole, it leaves them scattered like fragments of different films
stitched together. The last fifteen minutes, instead of resolving these arcs,
felt like a hurried teaser reel for a sequel.
The wheelchair villain,
for example, who appears as a senior figure, the mastermind and the figure of
menace and manipulation, tied to the smuggling network and cartel operations was
subjected to a sudden death, not at the hands of Suri as in the normal course
should have been, but through betrayal from within his circle. He was killed to
show ruthless power transfer but it lacked narrative justification. Alongside
him, there appears a younger man, who is supposed to be his heir apparent or at
least a surrogate son, but their dynamic is hazy: the script never clarifies if
it was truly a biological father, son relationship, or a mentor–protege
arrangement. Not a good idea.
Suri was deprived of
his fight against exploitation. The man in spectacles, always lurking beside wheelchair
villain, is left as a shadowy figure with no real explanation, seemingly saved
for a consequence. His presence could have been foreshadowed more strongly as
the next inheritor of power, giving impression of both closure and
anticipation. The smuggled gold is presented as the lifeline of the cartel and
a metaphor for the tribe’s stolen wealth. Yet when the climax arrives, the gold
is lost in chaos and never recovered. The connection between the wheelchair
Villian and the displaced tribe remains in ambiguity.
Viewers expected it to
be tied back to Suri’s mission, perhaps restored to the tribe as a symbol of
justice. Suri and Siva’s curve, the emotional heart of the film, also suffers
from incompleteness. Their reunion and joint fight against the cartel could
have been the climax’s emotional peak. But Siva is badly injured, his fate left
deliberately ambiguous. Even the doctor-lady’s childbirth sequence, though
visually striking, feels disconnected from Suri’s journey. The parallel of new
life and hope was promising, but the screenplay never ties it directly to the
hero’s transformation. The idea was there, but the execution lacked stitching.
Kingdom is a film I both liked and disliked, liked for its
vision, scale, and thematic courage, but disliked for its missing links, abrupt
resolutions, and fragmented storytelling. It showed the outline of what could
have been a better directed, but settled as an unfinished epic.
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