Early on in director Boyapati Sreenu’s Telugu mass outing Skanda - the attacker, starring Ram Pothineni, Sreeleela and Saiee Manjrekar, the Telangana chief minister’s (Sharath Lohithaswa) son elopes with the daughter of Andhra Pradesh chief minister (Ajay Purkar). The two CMs, erstwhile friends, turn foes. One snarls at the other, ‘Naa inti gate kaadhu, naa state toll gate dhaatu choodham (forget crossing the gates of my house, let me see if you can cross my State’s toll gates)’. If you are wondering which CM will win, midway through the film, a character introduces himself as Seema bidda (son of Rayalaseema soil) and later brings both the CMs to their knees. Another character warns the CMs that they will not hesitate to turn anything or anyone who stands in their way into pickles and bottle them up in jars! Oh well. One way to watch Skanda is to be amused by such lines, because it doesn’t have much going for it anyway.
Skanda -the attacker (Telugu)
Skanda - the attacker has everything that one would expect from a Boyapati Sreenu film — massy action sequences executed in slow motion during which heads will roll, limbs chopped and people hoisted up on spears or daggers; verbose rhyming dialogues that can serve as meme material; extra loud music (the brief to S. Thaman must have been to bring in additional drums and consistently keep the volume up) and leading women who don’t have much to do. One certainly doesn’t expect nuance and subtlety, but Skanda is an endurance test and an assault on the senses.
