A respected senior police officer (Narayan Pasari), who is widely known as the man responsible for bringing down the mafia in Mumbai faces charges of a fake encounter case. However, we get to know that Narayan Pasari is no hero from the very first scene.
Shivaji Rao IPS(Nagarjuna), who is appointed to lead the special investigation team to discover the truth in the illegal encounter case, gets in trouble for arresting the dubious evil officer Pasari. The rest of the film is about how Shivaji and Pasari try to outsmart one another.
Maybe Officer is not a run of the mill crime story, but as far as the execution and screenplay go, the film doesn’t come anywhere close to the lofty standards set by Ram Gopal Varma. The interesting characterization of the antagonist is the USP of Officer. How a national hero turns out to be a menacing antisocial villain is an exciting factor, but not everything that is good in writing translates well on screen.
In fact, the overall execution makes Officer boring and hard to sit through in spite of a decent story outline. There is a flashback scene to introduce the heroine, Myra Sareen, which absolutely made no sense as it did not convey anything and in fact, Myra just comes for a fraction of a second.
A lot of scenes do not have any dialogues. The characters keep discussing for minutes and we are left to stare at their faces with no clue as to what they are talking about. The first half was decent enough with few interesting investigation scenes but the film loses grip during the later portions of the first half and the film falls downhill from there.
The second half was way too predictable and there were a lot of loose ends left unaddressed. Action scenes looked gauche, especially the one-on-one climatic battle between Nagarjuna and the villain. Excessive violence is another drawback, while a few fight scenes looked stretched and uninteresting.
Nagarjuna is probably the only saving grace here as he tries his best to save this otherwise lacklustre crime drama. Nag looks super fit for his age and it has been a while since we saw him in a full-fledged action role. Apart from a few fight scenes which weren’t done so convincingly, he was perfectly apt for his role. Baby Kaavya who plays Nagarjuna’s daughter is cute and has performed well.
Cinematographer Rahul Penumatsa has experimented a lot with the camera angles. A lot of zoom shots and some weirdly conceived shots did give the film a different tone, but too much of anything could spoil the broth. One feels he got a little carried away with his experimental expedition. Though the songs were strictly average, the BGM worked at places.