‘Game Changer’ Movie Review: Shankar Fails to Change His Game, Despite A Valiant Ram Charan
Shankar's vision feels socially dated. It’s not that his brand of storytelling has changed; the problem is that it’s still the same.
Director: Shankar
Writers: Shankar, Karthik Subbaraj
Cast: Ram Charan, Kiara Advani, S.J. Suryah, Srikanth, Anjali, Sunil, Samuthirakani
Language: Hindi (dub)
In 2025, Shankar’s film-making feels dated at two different levels. It’s no mean feat. First, aesthetically. His movies imagine corruption, activism, justice and vigilantism the way children do when they’re asked to write school essays. An honest IAS officer named Ram wants to punish a greedy builder? No problem, immediately demolish his mall in front of him. Forget instant noodles, this is instant toodles. Punish a greedy rice merchant? No worries, expose the adulteration and have a minion print out his suspension letter right there (the typewriter from Nayak: The Real Hero is now a Macbook Air). Punish an eve-teaser? Simple, just have a middle-aged cop crack a sexist 1990s joke (“Who would want to stare at my wife for so long?”) first.
It goes on. Plan a meet-cute? Have the hero mistakenly beat up the heroine’s father for sexual harassment and win her over with his woke-violent intent. Want to show rage issues? Have an animated anger-meter show up on screen. Also have said man pursue IAS, and not IPS, to channel said rage. Want to fire a bunch of bad ministers? Have them sucked up into the sky with the flick of a finger. Want to be cheeky about lust? Have the word “culture” show up as a physical entity and separate the lips of the couple. Want a comic sidekick? Have a character that walks, looks and talks sideways — a step up from a cameraman’s ‘quirk’ of yelling transphobic slurs every time someone touches him (in 2001). In other words, the creativity that once looked like outlandish fun on Indian screens now looks immature. The song-and-dance pieces that once looked audacious now look like desperate fillers. The pulpy montages of a bureaucratically flawed nation (with reaction shots of offenders making cartoon faces) now look silly.
Secondly, and more crucially, the director’s vision feels socially dated. It’s not that his brand of storytelling has changed; the problem is that it’s still the same. The India it amplifies has moved both forward and backward. While it’s unfair to judge his previous movies through the Internet-era lens, it’s perfectly fair to view Indian 2 and now Game Changer like that. The familiar 160-minute saga of a brave IAS officer (Ram Charan) weeding out the rotten eggs in the Andhra Pradesh cabinets, becoming Chief Minister for an hour, and then randomly becoming the chief election officer to defy the evil CM and ensure unbiased voting across the state, is no longer a larger-than-life masala concept.
The political landscape is stranger than fiction today, and combined with the hyperawareness of the digital age, it changes our relationship with such films as well as our entertainment expectations from them. Just as American stand-up comics ran out of material the moment Donald Trump was elected President, Indian political dramas have run out of fantasy in the last decade. Not a lot of it is shocking and novel anymore. As a result, the simplification of issues and solutions puts these titles in the same genre bracket as supernatural fantasy-period actioners like Baahubali or RRR. There’s no winning. You anticipate a similar adrenaline rush, spectacle and visual language from both. But a film like Game Changer then feels more like Nayak: The ‘Unreal’ Hero.
A star like Ram Charan can only distract from the fundamental extinction of such treatment. His character, Ram, might find ways to win in the film, but he’s mostly fighting a losing battle against demigods and warriors. With the vintage Shankar-tinted glasses off, you start to notice the superficiality of the formula. The suspension of disbelief no longer applies. The shield disappears. His intro sequence — where a bunch of hooligans stop a train to attack him — lacks the gravity of a mass entry shot. The entire second half (including a flashback used as an excuse for a pointless double role) is a hard-sell. The first hour is still gaudy enough to commit. At one point, Ram enters a swanky black helicopter in a lungi and exits minutes later in a suit and tie. In another scene, he enters all wounded and bloody, but exits as a medically treated patient. I found myself wondering if the helicopter was perhaps a mobile hospital and hospitality service reserved for straight-laced IAS officers. Or was it just a time portal?
The viewer seated next to me in the morning show had no such illusions. He came in with a spring in his tea-and-nicotine-induced step. He made sure to capture the title slate and Ram’s entry on his cellphone. He sighed for a while, scrolled through racy Instagram photos, chuckled at the handful of misogynistic one-liners, looked up to see Kiara Advani playing a male fantasy in the song Dhop, and went back to his phone. Once the film ended, out came his video recorder for the post-credits scene. I suppose you could call that a game-changing viewing experience — especially if the game is all about registering one’s life. The movie itself is incidental, it’s the Reels that matter.