Unlike any other regional language movies in India, Telugu movies give special importance to the so called lady-oriented films. Charmi is one actor who has found respect with such films. ‘Sye Aata’ is yet another tale where she is the protagonist. And this time the filmmakers promised a film set around TV dance competitions, which Charmi is known to enjoy a lot. How good is the play in ‘Sye Aata’? Read On!

What’s it about: The line in ‘Sye Aata’ is simple. Shankar and Pandit are two warring mafia leaders in Hyderabad, who are bent on finishing each other or so it seems. Important members of their gangs are being finished off one by one, each assuming the other is doing the job. Enter Malleshwari, a dance teacher, who loves to call herself ‘Kathi, Vizag Kathi’. The lady has come to Hyderabad to participate in a reality Television dance competition. Disturbed by some goons, the kick-ass girl fights their boss - Shankar.

Shankar hatches a clever plan to put Malleshwari in a spot – he kidnaps her students and sets this otherwise loud speaking girl a simple target - kill Pandit’s son Panda. How Malleshwari find a way out of all this confusion, and who is actually killing the gang members one by one becomes the rest of the film’s story.

What is Good: The film’s background music, songs and dance sequences are good. Charmi, as Malleshwari, acts well in the second half and her energy for dance is appreciable. She gets to mouth some extremely mass dialogues that will be delivered by any South Indian Mass hero. It seems she brought a page out of her characterization from the script of ‘Sri Anjaneyam’.

Kota Srinivasa Rao, who plays Shankar, is at his usual best. Comedy by M.S.Narayana, Bharath is ok, while Ali’s performance as ‘Ghajini’ evokes some laughs.

The story of the film manages to keep you interested till the first half and to an extent in the second half, and that is what works for the film.

What is bad: While the concept of the film is just about good, the screenplay pales in front of what could have been done. The movie focuses more on the dances, songs, comedy scenes than creating the relatble or believable emotions. And whenever it tries to create those suspense filled moments, they are spoilt by bad to average graphics or the actors seem disinterested.

What doesn’t work for the film is the logic of Shankar behind choosing Malleshwari to kill his enemy, while his henchmen are good enough to kill his enemy’s other subordinates. Even then, leaving her free takes all the fun away from the story, especially because the ‘forced killer’ meets a police officer one too many times.

Any ‘thriller’ works on two things - raising the anticipation, and breaking almost everyone’s imagination with a twist. It is the second part that the film fails as when finally the twist arrives, it is too clichéd.

From the Technical Side: Choreography in almost all songs and music match each other well. Visual effects for the titles and animation for a song are good, but they are terribly done in a Hussain Sagar Buddha Statue scene. Dialogues could have been better, but they are as good as the screenplay demands.

Director Pawan did good job in certain individual scenes and succeeds in keeping the audiences guessing to a level. But by the end of the film, one feels as if we’ve just watched a film that is too good for Television but not up there with Good Cinema.

Final Point: It isn’t all bad fare at all as it has its moments. Obviously the filmmakers will learn a lot from this one, and will go onto do a much better job with their next one.