Salute Telugu Movie Review

Film: SALUTE

Rating: 2.5/5

Banner: GK Productions

Cast: Vishal, Nayantara, Upendra, Kota, Ali, Brahmanandam and others

Music: Harris Jayaraj

Cinematography: R D Rajasekhar

Director: Rajasekhar

Producer: Vikram Krishna

Released Date: August 14, 2008


Story:

A regular cop story, the movie begins with Sathyam (Vishal) who is a tough cop and an honest one too. He is an ACP and believes that law and order must be maintained at all times, however he is more of a peace lover and strongly believes that anyone who has done something wrong can be taken to task under the purview of justice and book of law without using any special methods. This also makes him feel repulsive about the encounter methods.


However things take a turn when a well known politician (Kota) wants to get on to the chair of the Chief Minister and in this process, he hires a contract killer and gives him a list of names that have to be killed. However, he has a shock of his life when he gets news from the killer that someone else is already on the job without his involvement. Sathyam is given the assignment of nabbing the culprit and finally he manages to arrest Prathap (Upendra) who ironically is an ex cop himself but then he does not believe in the law system since he gets betrayed professionally. The ideology clash between Sathyam and Pratap goes to a peak and then the hero decides to put an end to this by proving his point. Is he successful in his mission? What is the link between Divya (Nayantara) the crime reporter and him? All this forms the rest of the story.


Presentation:

The director has come up with a wafer thin plot and though his presentation was good, the narration lost out big time and it turned out to be pathetic. The dialogues are stale, the script is feeble, the screenplay has not been executed perfectly. The saving grace for the movie is the above average music with some soulful tunes and the cinematography was eye catching. The costumes department was decent and the frontline sectors failed miserably.


Vishal is impressive in his new muscular look and looked like the perfect cop guess that's one reason why he looked stiff at few scenes, Nayan on the other hand was oozing out glamour in the songs but then she was totally decked up during the movie so her role is actually negligible. Upendra did his bit to give an anti hero feeling but his role was not well etched, Kota did a brilliant performance while the comedy track between Ali and Brahmanandam looked silly. The others did not have much scope to perform so they are not in the list.


Conclusion:

It was a well thought out idea to bring about two cops with different perceptions but then enough fuel needs to be filled to bring out the intensity in characters which was missing completely. While the first half goes about in the regular dull mode without much to offer, a twist comes before the interval which rises expectations but then the second half also turned out to be a disappointment as nothing much was there in it. The inclusion of songs at wrong situations was another disturbance which really irked the audience. It is very hard for the movie to live up to the hype created but it might just make its money given the steamy song USP and the presence of Vishal and Nayan.