Rules Ranjann Movie Review: Office Hilarity To Apartment Absurdity, A Comedic Rollercoaster That Loses Its Way

An overspill of silliness can be mildly amusing, provided you don’t object to the characters behaving like dimwits on drugs.

The hero in is Mano Ranjan(get the entertaining name?) played by Kiran Abbavaram, a qualified engineer from Hyderabad who comes to Mumbai for a job where apparently he cannot understand a word of Hindi. So his Mumbai colleagues in Mumbai(they all speak with thick South Indian accents) make fun of him by calling him names in Hindi,like ‘Dimwit’, ‘Idiot’ and ‘Fool’. Nothing more serious: the film wouldn’t want to lose its PG13 romcom licence.

The funny part of this dumped charade, if we may call it that, is that Mano undergoes a change of perception after he decides to take charge of the office and his callous lazy colleagues. He fixes a time for all their office activity. Boss Anu Kapoor(I am not asking what he is doing in this cretinous comic caper, I don’t want to know) is very happy with Mano’s performance. He gives him a promotion, which adds to the commotion.

If the film had only remained focused on Mano’s adventures in his office. But no. Ambitiously , the narrative now moves to Mano’s residence and a bloody misogynistic in the apartment nextdoor named bloke Kamesh(Vennela Kishore, being seen in every other Telugu film as the hero’s snide-kick). Kamesh who names Daniel Webber as his inspiration(the Sunny Leone connection) thinks it is amusing to bring a new girl home every night and ridicule her. Mano is not amused . Neither are we.

Where is this going? Should we even bother? Writer-director Rathinam Krishna has little up his sleeve to keep us involved. He relies blindly on the dialogues and the hero, and one of them lets him down constantly.

While the office politics in the first-half may be of some interest to some, the romance and the hurdles to its culmination in the second-half are slanderously sloppy and quarter-baked with none of the actors showing any inclination to lift the plot from the doldrums.

This comedy of arrears should not be taken seriously at all. Its helmers are out to have fun even if they look ridiculous from our seats in movie theatres.Even on OTT Rules Ranjaan is fun only aimless evening,