The old men and the sea: "Devara: Part 1"

Another season, another swaggering pan-Indian blockbuster: a full three hours in the cinema, stacked with talent, so byzantine in its design it can't possibly be paid off in one go, even if it might be best for all parties if it were. The Telugu-derived Devara: Part 1 shares other features with its immediate predecessors in this field. A beardy wannabe-Baahubali of a hero, oft observed striking a power stance on some tall vantage point; songs that sound like battle cries or death rattles; a dust-up of some description every ten minutes. It's forever too loud to get too close, but watching this cinema of abundant spectacles has felt like a return to the cinema of the 1910s and 1920s: narrative by the yard, story for story's sake, the serial form redeployed to hook those whose attention may have wandered elsewhere during the pandemic. This new wave of pan-Indian filmmaking - lavishly well-appointed, maximal to the max - is clearly a Covid-era phenomenon, although it already appears a touch wheezing, if not entirely spent. There's been no sign as yet of a Part 2 for either the one about the descendant of mythological figures (Brahmāstra) or the one about illegal sandalwood smuggling (Pushpa). Devara, written and directed by Koratala Siva, risks a certain familiarity, in that it, too, is about smuggling, albeit of a considerably damper variety.

We open in the Bombay of 1996, with a police task force being set on the trail of sibling gangsters who at this stage seem a directorial feint or red herring. The investigation instead leads to the backwaters of Tamil Nadu, where the discovery of myriad bodies on the ocean floor cues an extended flashback to 1984 that is, as far as D1 is concerned, the main event. It involves our old friend NT Rama Rao Jr. from RRR, a title to which Siva, in the spirit of oneupmanship that governs these behemoth-movies, has effectively prefixed a very large capital G. Peering out from beneath a tight, period-appropriate bubbleperm that recalls Lionel Richie in the "All Night Long" video, the star's eponymous hero is introduced running a swashbuckling criminal operation - raiding passing cargo ships to support his impoverished coastal community - which will unravel into bloody chaos as his right-hand man Bhaira (Bollywood's own Saif Ali Khan, as jacked as the movie itself beneath a dorky pageboy haircut) succumbs to greed. Siva, we quickly twig, is doing some smuggling of his own. D1 is a business story (a management story, even) nestled inside the traditionally sleek lines of the police procedural. At least two films for the price of one ticket, then: say what you like about the pan-Indian model, you rarely leave the cinema feeling shortchanged for narrative.

More likely, I think - and especially here - we start to feel bludgeoned by it. For a while, during D1's stronger first half, Siva is telling a small, instructional, conceivably relatable tale on the theme of how best to run a company: ethically (or as ethically as any pirate can), if you're a Devara, ruthlessly, if you're a Bhaira. This pair could be Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg, if those whey-faced striplings had ever felt compelled to get their feet wet and compete at some sort of regional Royal Rumble where wrestlers bind themselves with cloth and go at it until dawn. (At which point, some of the audience may be thinking: dudes, just fuck already.) The story of their severance has been expanded via the type of grand gesture that has always played well on the big screen: Devara singlehandedly pushing four shipping containers packed with explosives off a cliff, and then walking away in slo-mo as the illegal cargo detonates behind him, or late-night smuggling missions on the high seas, made only more fraught when one faction is trying to bump off another. (And that's before anyone factors in the sharks in these waters.) Siva is capable of choice pulpy delicacies. During a midfilm beach massacre, which starts with an army of scuttling ambushers emerging from the sands like crabs, an arc of blood from our hero's D-shaped sickle flies up and completes the crescent moon above. Increasingly, though, we find this filmmaker hammering away on the same notes with the same tools. The trouble with D1 isn't that it's cranked up to 11; it's that it gets stuck there from an early stage.

Other variations on the theme of Big must be permissible, but it's clear these would-be universal crowdpullers still have absolutely no idea what to do with the women in their midst. This cycle has already wasted performers as queenly as Alia Bhatt (RRR) and Deepika Padukone (this summer's Kalki 2898 A.D.), instead centralising literally and figuratively bristling men; it's yet to engineer a single female character comparable to any of the short-fused Hulks stomping around waving metaphorical willies. D1, for its part, puts up Janhvi Kapoor, introduced at bath in what looks terribly like a shampoo commercial, in the impossible role of simpering boatbuilder who just wants herself a manly man. Kapoor's introduction, at the start of the second half, is the point at which Siva's film noticeably starts to sputter; having had a nice sit down during the intermission, the movie struggles to get up and running again, and restarting from something like scratch, with NTR in the far less compelling role of Devara's hapless offspring, feels like a step in the wrong direction. Kapoor's Thangam gets the one and only musical number that doesn't feel like a guttural howl into the abyss, but even this turns out, lyrically, to be all about our guy. For all that they might appear new, these pan-Indian films strike me as more than ever old man's tales: repetitive or otherwise rambling, prone to distraction, overstretched for being so simplistic, thus exhausting, and stuck on a musty model of heroism, dependent to the last on who can take and inflict the most pain. (I suspect you'd have to be quite the masochist to exit feeling buzzed rather than wiped out.) This latest example, a blood feud in an elephants' graveyard, shows flashes of lead in its pencil, but you'll almost certainly have forgotten who's pursuing whom (and why) by the time Devara: Part 2 lumbers into view.

Devara: Part 1 is now playing in selected cinemas.