'Maa Nanna Superhero' Review: A Father-Son Drama That Nearly Hits the Sweet Spot

Director: Abhilash Kankara
Writer: Abhilash Kankara, M.V.S. Bharadwaj, Shravan Madala
Cast: Sudheer Babu, Sai Chand, Sayaji Shinde, Aarna, Raju Sundaram, Shashank, Aamani
Language: Telugu

Almost everything revolves around the concept of luck in Abhilash Kankara's Maa Nanna Superhero. Prakash (Sai Chand), a recently widowed truck driver, is compelled to leave his infant son at an orphanage. But, as his luck would have it, he would get arrested the same night and put in prison for a crime he never committed. Cut to about 25 years later, the infant son (named Johnny, played by Sudheer Babu) is now living with his adoptive father, but he feels he isn't lucky enough to win the love and affection of the second paternal figure in his life. The adoptive father himself (Sayaji Shinde), once a rational man, feels that the kid he brought home from that orphanage also carried bad luck with him, and perhaps that is why he lost his job and his wife to cancer.

Interestingly, both the real and the adoptive dads have a bit of a thirst for gambling (one is into lottery and the other into stock trading), which rides so much on luck. And Johnny, for no fault of his, doesn't realise that he is the sole loser caught between two luckless men.

In a way, Maa Nanna Superhero comes as an antidote to the tempestuousness of a film like Animal (2023), which had its daddy issues pronounced in ultra-bold letters along with a few splashes of blood and tears. Both films have young men idolising their fathers as superheroes, and in both cases, the admiration largely goes unrequited. Both films also have those young men going to great lengths to fight for their respective fathers' lives and dignity, particularly through less noble means.

Yet, Kankara channels his protagonist's murky emotions without any sense of contempt or anger like Animal director Sandeep Reddy Vanga chooses to, and the result of his choices incidentally feels a lot more nuanced and comforting. While Animal's Ranvijay goes on an over-corrective overdrive to hide his flaws and insecurities, Maa Nanna Superhero's Johnny simply does what he has always done — take care of his father like a father, and bail him out of trouble every single time. The difference isn't in the reactions but in the fundamentals.

And it is through these choices that this Telugu film engages you. It takes a seemingly simple set-up of a father looking for his long-lost son, but then gradually convolutes the story before arriving at the expected ending, taking its time to make its case. At one point, somewhere in the first 30-45 minutes of the runtime, Maa Nanna Superhero makes us wish for the obvious and wants us to see Johnny and his real dad find each other as soon as possible. In the same vein, it neither paints a negative picture of his adoptive father nor does it put the man on a pedestal. All it tries to tell us is that Johnny was dealt a bad hand when he left the orphanage, and now that his real father, the one who genuinely loves him, is out there restlessly looking for him (with an old passport photo of the kid and all), their union has to come as the ultimate resolution.

But the film, as already pointed out, isn't in the mood to get there just as yet. Maybe Johnny needs to be put under a test of some kind to arrive at that resolution. Maybe there's time for him and Prakash — total strangers to each other — to take a trip together, during which they can inadvertently find the joys they have missed all along. And maybe there isn't a proper resolution to this after all.

That sudden switch in tone — from a domestic drama to a bumbling road movie — is both disarming and frustrating; disarming because the film throws caution to the wind and tries something completely new for a while. Johnny and Prakash become co-conspirators while on the road, and even though the former isn't exactly honest about who he is and what his intentions are, he unwittingly participates in the hijinks that his adoptive father never allowed. Sure, the gush of humour and silliness don’t really land the way they hope to, but when you realise Kankara was using all of that to build up to a bigger payoff, those scenes don't hurt as much.

Sudheer Babu and Sai Chand strike solid camaraderie in these sequences. Babu, with his undemonstrative face, does a fine job of letting his body language do all the talking, while the veteran actor Chand puts on an impressive show with possibly the best-written part in the whole film. There's a scene in the pre-climactic portion inside a hospital that involves one of them double-crossing the other, and the other pleading for things to not end this way. It's a situation we expect to see from afar, but the way it is staged and performed makes it memorable. And the synergy that the two actors share is on perfect display here.

At the same time, Maa Nanna Superhero starts to feel too contrived when it goes overboard with sentimentalism. The background score, specifically, becomes the bane of the film because of just how manipulative and intrusive it is, and it doesn't help that the narrative is loaded with "tender" moments to be underscored. There's also a lot of room for serendipity (another form of luck, if you will), and the writing freely uses its creative liberty to design certain elements instead of allowing them to naturally find a place. How Johnny and Prakash end up travelling together is one such contrivance that needed better agency, but the film's single-mindedness to let the emotion be the fulcrum gets the better of it.

Similarly, several new characters crop up from time to time, but a majority of them don't cast the right impression. There's a love-interest character, a friend who turns a foe, a foe who turns a friend, an affable ride-along partner and a smattering of others who come in only to untie the narrative knots instead of being their own people in the story. Even Prakash’s internal turmoil, of carrying that weight of being away from his son for so many years, is underwhelmingly conceived. His response to life's biggest curveball is to surrender, but surrendering feels unnatural and convenient for the story, and it is never a product of wisdom.

Regardless, Maa Nanna Superhero works despite all the glitches. It unfolds like an endearing relationship procedural that views a complicated scenario through a new lens, and doesn't try to force-fit a solution. It doesn't fully hit the sweet spot either, given its overripe nature, but it isn't every day that you find a mature drama that knows what it is doing. This one knew all along what it wanted to be, and the final shot suggests just that.