The last samurai: "They Call Him O.G."

They do things differently in India. The Telugu actioner They Call Him O.G. (or just O.G., depending on your interpretation of the title card) is the second of two 2025 comeback vehicles for the actor Pawan Kalyan, who's spent the past couple of years serving as Deputy Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh in his side hustle as an MP for the liberal Janasena Party. July's Hari Hara Veera Mallu was a conventional torn-from-the-history-books drama that arrived trailing one of those ominous "Part 1" subtitles; this, by total contrast, is a not unstylish but lore-heavy runaround that suggests its emergent writer-director Sujeeth has spent Kalyan's time in office with his nose lodged squarely in a succession of comic books. A prologue, for example, suggests post-WW2 Tokyo was consumed by a bloody turf war between yakuza and, erm, samurai; the last of the latter was apparently sheltering a young Indian protégé - the Ojas Gambheer of the title - who, when things got existential, fled for Mumbai, reappearing at the turn of the 1980s (now played by Kalyan) as the underworld's most notorious badass. Well okay, you go, this is patently nonsense, a movie designed to further stimulate excitable young energy-drink consumers, from a filmmaker barely out of his teens himself. Foremost among its myriad implausibilities: that there should be a centrist teddy bear in the middle of all these scuffles and smackdowns. (It's a bit like casting Sir Ed Davey as John Wick.) But sometimes, on a quiet Wednesday afternoon when there's nothing more pressing for you to be getting on with, patent nonsense does the job.

Another of the South Indian industry's legion of intense-looking leading men with intense-looking facial hair, Kalyan gets the traditional filmi hero's reintroduction: amid reports of a violent storm approaching the Mumbai region, he pops into frame kohl-eyed and clutching the samurai sword he will use to carve himself a larger market share. More than once over the two hours that follow, he swings his nunchuks and singlehandedly sees off a small army of foes while incurring no greater damage than a tear to his designer shirt. Mostly, he's here to look cool: he strikes poses on a dockside, empties his cartridge shells one-handed, flaunts some aikido capability, and generally puts the wind up Emraan Hashmi as a rival badass, miffed that someone's half-inched his shipping container containing who-cares-what. For the star, it must have been a nice change from what's become the day job, sitting in dusty conference rooms trying to get rural bus routes reopened. (The best way to approach O.G. is as a district councillor's idle, Billy Liar!-like daydream of a more exciting life.) Still, there are too many scenes you'll have seen before, played by supporting players who'll have likely played these scenes before. This is a film whose growly men all look and sound like Matt Berry; the women's job is to sit around looking pretty while those men get on with Man Stuff, their children's to toddle in slo-mo towards some precipitating incident. Experienced lenser Ravi K. Chandran (who shot Bhansali's Black and Saawariya, and more recently Mani Ratnam's Thug Life) gives these images a compelling sheen, and a few sequences pop like fireworks; O.G. often seems less a film than an especially good-looking advert for its own protagonist. Sujeeth keeps it rattling along, revealing in passing a directorial fondness for spectacular forms of decapitation; the movie finally tumbles on the fun side of silly. Yet with his story and legend failing to rise to the level of the imagery, I'll wager you'll have forgotten all about it in the time it takes to walk back to the bus stop afterwards. They called him what now?

They Call Him O.G. is now playing in selected cinemas.