The faults in our stars: "Radhe Shyam"

Never underestimate the power of Prabhas. The dashing Telugu star of the Baahubali blockbusters singlehandedly lifted the lulu star-crossed romance Radhe Shyam into the UK Top 10 last week, in the face of stiff opposition from The Batman, Gangubai Kathiawadi and the most bananas script of this or any other year. For starters: the star's playing Vikramaditya, "the Einstein of palmistry" - signature look: furrowed brow, black polo neck - introduced undertaking the palmist equivalent of a Gap year in Europe, which seems to entail bedding a never-ending supply of pliant blondes before dumping them in unusual locations: up a mountain, at the side of the road, wherever. As he insists upon repeating: "I don't want a relationship, just flirtationship." We're waiting for the one girl to come along who might stop him in his tracks, and - oh look - here's Prerana (Pooja Hegde), a scarcely less flighty sort first seen roping understandably puzzled backpackers into gripping her scarf like a bungee cord so she can hang out the open side of a fast-moving train. (Once again, an Indian film that can only remind British viewers of poor Vyvyan on TV's The Young Ones.)

Having established the perilously low bar of its own credibility, Radhe Shyam sets off round the continent on a tour of those countries that were open to overseas travellers during the Covid pandemic. The final destination is London, where our hero's mum is set to perform in the prestigious "London Dance Festival" (nope, never heard of it); for most of these two hours, we hunker down in Italy, where our lovers scribble all over the walls of an old railway station without on-the-spot fines being issued, and we're invited to believe a coachload of local prep schoolers would understand the messages Vikram and Prerana etch into window condensation in their native Telugu. We're in the land of the Romance languages, of course - and you should see the fuss writer-director Radha Krishna Kumar makes over a hospital called "Destino" - but this is clearly one of those films that invites, nay encourages, its audience to forgive its copious nonsense because said nonsense is being deployed in the service of a big old collective swoon. It's a getaway that involves taking leave of one's own senses.

A not unenjoyable mixed bag, though, and Kumar at least ensures this is big screen-ready nonsense. The connective train journeys beget some ugly green-screen, and London, when we finally arrive, is but a CG Tower Bridge, presumably due to travel restrictions. Yet elsewhere the film offers pleasant pan-European scenery and sets the size of the Sistine Chapel, the better to accommodate both this narrative's wilder swings and the fact its head is so far up in the stratosphere. (Look out for the operating theatre that shares an interior designer with La Scala.) Its ideas really are loopy-lou. Vikram's palmistry gift is illustrated by a rubbing of the forehead and Psych-like VFX that tell him what to tell his clients. And the movie betrays no indication that its hero might be a puffed-up phoney, even after he tells Prerana "you are going to live one hundred years" and she promptly starts bleeding from the nose. (Maybe he's onto something: even after a terminal cancer diagnosis, Hegde is soon radiant again.) Sometimes a film beguiles you in spite of getting barely one in ten of the basics right; here's a case in point. After being hit by a speeding bus, Vikram can be seen walking - bloodsoaked but upright - into the ER where Prerana happens to work as a doctor, albeit one most commonly dressed as a flower girl; five minutes later, he's discharged without a scratch or a scar. No-one has any luggage or bags to haul around with them; Vikram doesn't even have a coat when he bikes up a mountain in the pouring rain.

And so you conclude this is one of those confections whipped up in haste for no other reason than to get an audience back in the same room as their idols after a few months (or, in our germy case, years) apart. Even when giving a lengthy monologue about the price of a hairclip, Prabhas remains gravely debonair in his rollnecks; I couldn't tell you how old he is just from looking, though I would say there are points where his onscreen mother appears a good ten years younger than he is. Hegde is an exceedingly pretty actress doing her best with a role that feels as if someone in the vicinity - whether Vikram, the screenwriters or the fates - is messing terribly with her. If you were feeling especially harsh, you might dismiss Radhe Shyam as every bit as much a fuckboy as its gadabout of a protagonist: a film that toys with the emotions of any onlookers, offering a few scant minutes of fun here and there while steadfastly refusing to coalesce into a story worth telling or remembering. Yet it is fun, in an absurd way, and a big part of that craziness is that the budget only seems to swell as the movie barrels onwards: Kumar gives us a yowling great final act in which Vikram undergoes trial by fire and sea, then tacks on some bonus nonsense involving a phone call being patched through to that grandly operatic operating space. If Mystic Meg, Eileen Drewery and James Cameron had collaborated on a money-to-burn Telugu production at the height of a deadly global pandemic, this might have been the result: different, to be sure, but also three-quarters of the way to being completely, certifiably cuckoo.

Radhe Shyam is now playing in selected cinemas.