Good intentions don’t necessarily translate to good cinema and when it comes to depicting ‘fun, frolic’, no matter what your intentions are, the end product hardly comes close to what a director would have visualized. No one knows what Umesh Kumar, the director of Cricket, Girls and Beer had in mind when he wanted to make this film and there are plenty of reasons why you wouldn’t want to remember the film if you do watch it. Leave the clichés in the film, it drags so much that you desperately crave for some good quality in at least one of the three subplots of the film – Cricket, Girls and Beer.

Vijay (Aadarsh Balakrishna), Vikram (Naga Shaurya) and Vivek (Surya Tej) are brothers and all of them study in the same college – MIT (Myssamma Institute of Technology). Vijay loves Cricket, Vikram is crazy about beer and Vivek is in love with Swapna (Sarika Affan). However, Swapna’s marriage is fixed with Vicky (Raja Sridhar), who also studies in the same college. When Vivek and Vicky fight with each other, the latter asks a goon to kill Vivek. How this incident changes the lives of Vijay, Vikram and Vicky forms the rest of the story.

Cricket, Girls and Beer falters right from the beginning. The three lead actors are moderately rich, yet they prefer sleeping on the floor. The choice of ‘college’ and the various locales where the film has been shot never give an impression that the makers did their research. The film might have been made on a low budget, but that cannot be an excuse why none of the scenes, barring those shot inside classrooms, give an impression that the film was shot in an actual college. It’s hard to take a college film like this seriously, if it doesn’t look its part.

While the three lead actors try to put up a sincere show, the rest of the actors hardly make an impression. Either the characterization is too clichéd or the sequence of events is extremely predictable. The climax is badly edited and it drags a lot. Adarsh is restricted to playing cricket, Shaurya has a decent role and he does well and Surya Tej, around whom the story revolves, is okay. Sarika Affan has nothing much to offer in the film. Vinod Kumar and Raja Sridhar have no option but to ham it up whenever necessary. MS Narayana is completely wasted in his role and same is the case with bunch of heroes’ friends.

Except for couple of songs composed by Das and Shyam Vai, it’s hard to find one good aspect in this film which is praiseworthy. Cinematography by Sarat is bad. Most of the scenes in the film are dull and even the production values are bad. In the end, perhaps only Umesh Kumar would know what he wanted to make in the first place because it’s hard to sit through the film. Stay away.

(The review was first published in ‘The Hans India’ newspaper on October 2, 2011)

By,

Hemanth

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