Kaadan is a social drama, written and directed by Prabhu Solomon. Rana Daggubati plays the titular lead role while Vishnu Vishal, Zoya Hussain and Shriya Pilgaonkar play crucial supporting roles among others. The film is bankrolled by Eros Now International.
Kaadan is a film that's set in a huge reserved forest with Veerabharathi (a) Kaadan (Rana Daggubati) living amongst the animals. He is like the Tarzan of the forest, and can communicate with the animals pretty easily, and they too listen to him. A voice-over reveals that he has won the award - 'Forestman of India' for planting more than a lakh saplings in the forest.
When there is a premise that has a man living in a forest, the story naturally steers towards what happens when someone tries to destroy the forest for their personal needs. On that note, Kaadan is no different. Kaadan is close with elephants, and a minister decides to build a residential township in an elephant corridor. This causes the elephants to take diversion and enter nearby villages. How Kaadan manages to break the walls of the township and get the land back forms the rest of the story.
Vishnu Vishal appears as a mahout of a 'Kumki' elephant. He helps the minister complete building the township. He is the only character with grey shades, and it would have been interesting to see what his character offers to the film. But post interval, his character vanishes and we never see him. Why invest so much in characters when they are not going to offer anything to the plot? This is a question that keeps lingering once the film ends.
The intent of the film is at the right place and the messaging is noble. This makes us root for Kaadan, and when he suffers, we feel the pain too. These portions are the film's strongest. But these moments are very few in number. The rest of the film lacks twists and surprises, and that affects the engagement. The predictability also doesn't help the film's cause. The only thing that keeps us going is Rana Daggubati's performance. He literally shoulders the film extremely well.
Right from the word go, the film's engagement is impacted with cliches and one-note characters. There is a lot of potential to develop characters, especially the ones of Zoya Hussain and Shriya Pilgaonkar. Zoya Hussain is earnest as a woman protecting the people of the forest. She is branded as a terrorist by the government, and a backstory regarding how she got into this would have made us empathize with her. Shriya Pilgaonkar appears as a journalist who travels with Kaadan throughout but her role doesn't seem to make an impact because her actions don't affect the narrative much. It is not an eye candy role, but her role lacks flesh and bones.
The frames and colours used by cinematographer AR Ashok Kumar are good, adds grandness, but the CGI work could have been better. Apart from that, the camerawork lends basic support to the narrative. The music too complements the film well.
The film has a lot of scenes involving elephants, and that could be an attractive sight for kids and family audiences. Had the film done away with the cliches in writing and given us a lot of entertaining moments throughout the film, the engagement would have been higher and could have been a delightful watch for the weekend.