‘Mass Jathara’ Movie Review: A Gruelling Cocktail Of Clichés

It’s hard to put together what one takes away from a film like Mass Jathara. Is it a sense of unreliable nostalgia? Or the urge to indulge in cinematic doomscrolling? Like every other boilerplate actioner, the Telugu film revolves around a conventionally good person (Ravi Teja is a cop in this case, not unlike protagonists in this genre) taking on a conventionally evil person (Naveen Chandra gets the honour here) in between a song here and a dance there. But this is a film that couldn’t be bothered to give us even a touch of inventiveness with its generous offering of familiarity. As if urged by a string of AI prompts, the film gives us a play-by-play of every cliché we’ve begrudgingly witnessed in the cinema halls over the past few years.

A still from the film

Ravi Teja is Lakshman Bheri, a cop who is transferred to a smaller town in Andhra Pradesh to take care of bigger fish. But he isn’t your regular cop. He’s a railway cop, which the film is super excited about. While this tiny detail does give Mass Jathara something resembling a spark — Lakshman mortifies rowdies for not buying platform tickets — it doesn’t really do anything with this idea apart from using it for comedy tracks. When Lakshman realises that he has his work cut out for him at Adavivaram (in the form of farmers who harvest and sell weed and a girlfriend who has a few tricks up her sleeve), he decides to clean up the town. 

A still from the film

The intrigue of Lakshman being an inspector at the RPF wears pretty thin as its writing doesn’t use it any more than just a perfunctory tool. One of Lakshman’s biggest conflicts in the film is his being a police officer in a jurisdiction that doesn’t give him a lot of authority. But the film doesn’t bother leaning into this detail to offer any respite. We’re shown glimpses of his childhood with fragmented portions of flashback featuring a young Lakshman and his grandfather (Rajendra Prasad). Like prompts entered to generate a typical action film, we’re shown scene after scene of plot edited with dissonance. On paper, Lakshman has an endearing relationship with his grandfather; he chooses the railway police force as a mark of loyalty to family and fights a weirdly eccentric druggie. Mass Jathara computes these prompts and pads the familiarity with even more flab.

A still from the film

We lose track of the number of times the film cuts to a song during a crucial moment, as much as Shivudu (Naveen Chandra) loses track of his load of marijuana. The dialogue and score department (lines such as “chal hatt” pass for punch dialogue here) seem to fight tooth and nail as to who can regress the film more. While Sreeleela gets at least a tiny subplot here, her sister in the film hardly utters a word through the entire runtime. We gather that this is a film that's built to celebrate its hero’s machismo and, in the process, also romanticises age-gap pairings. But does it have to be this dreary?