Donga Naa Koduku Review: No Laughs, Just Lewdness
Young actor Mouli Tanuj Prasanth returns with Donga Naa Koduku, playing a street-smart youngster who bluffs his way out of trouble.
Cast: Mouli Tanuj Prasanth, Sushmita Shetty, Raghu Babu, Ali, Rajitha, Priya, Babloo, Sudarshan, Bhadram, Ramana Bhargav, Nanda Gopal and others
Director: Sreenu Kambala
Young actor Mouli Tanuj Prasanth won over Telugu audiences with Little Hearts, where his youthful energy and natural comic timing worked in the film's favour. He returns with Donga Naa Koduku, playing a street-smart youngster who bluffs his way out of trouble. However, this dark comedy proves disappointing, with neither its humour nor its crime angle making much of an impact.
Perhaps Mouli wanted to move beyond his familiar boy-next-door image and try a more conventional hero role with elevations and mass moments. But the attempt feels premature. The film also highlights how difficult it is to pull off a dark comedy. The genre requires a careful balance of suspense, tension and humour, keeping audiences guessing until the truth unfolds. Unfortunately, director Sreenu Kambala fails to get any of these elements right. The film neither creates tension nor delivers consistent laughs, eventually making a mockery of the genre.
The biggest problem is the kind of humour the director relies on. Much of the film appears designed to cater to a social media audience. While youthful humour is welcome, several scenes cross the line into vulgarity, with double-meaning dialogues doing most of the heavy lifting. The attempt to be edgy ends up looking desperate.
Even the romantic track between Mouli and Sushmita Shetty feels forced. While most films establish a connection between the lead pair through a conventional introduction, here their interactions largely revolve around vulgar jokes and double entendres. The heroine's unquestioning innocence and attraction towards the hero are also difficult to digest, making the love story feel even more artificial.
The story revolves around Eeshwar (Mouli Tanuj Prasanth), a good-for-nothing youngster who spends most of his time gambling and squandering money. Fed up with his irresponsible behaviour, his father gets him a job as a salesperson at a jewellery store. Eeshwar falls in love with Deepu (Sushmita Shetty), and she reciprocates his feelings. However, his gambling habit soon lands him in trouble. After losing money, he borrows an amount by mortgaging Deepu's jewellery. Her parents give him a month's time to repay the money.
With no easy way out, Eeshwar comes up with a plan to rob the very jewellery store where he works. But the robbery angle, which should have been the film's biggest hook, fails to generate much curiosity.
The basic premise has enough potential for an entertaining crime comedy. However, the screenplay turns out to be the film's biggest weakness. The director fails to build curiosity around the robbery or keep audiences invested in what happens next. Instead, the narrative repeatedly slips into loud comedy, losing whatever suspense the story could have generated.
Turning a crime drama into a comedy is not a bad idea in itself, but the humour needs to complement the story. Here, the excessive reliance on double entendres and crass jokes makes several scenes feel cheap and forced. A few sequences manage to generate laughs, but they are too far apart to make the film engaging. The screenplay also goes around in circles at several points, testing the audience's patience.
Mouli needs to be more careful about his script choices. After making a promising impression with Little Hearts, he would be better served by choosing refreshing love stories and character-driven entertainers rather than attempting genre-bending subjects without the right material. The romantic track lacks freshness, the jewellery robbery angle is underdeveloped, and the supporting characters offer little to strengthen the narrative.
Mythri Movie Makers, who have made big-ticket films, have to avoid these kinds of low-grade stuff.
