Tuck Jagadish is an action drama film written and directed by Shiva Nirvana, and it has Nani playing the titular character. Aishwarya Rajesh and Ritu Varma play the female leads while Daniel Balaji is the antagonist in this film, produced by Sahu Garapati and Harish Peddi under the banner Shine Screens. The film was released on the OTT Platform Amazon Prime.
Nani plays the role of Jagadish, the son of Aadhisesh Naidu, who is a zamindar in the village of Bhudevipuram. When he passes away, there is a rift in the family about sharing the wealth, and how Jagadish solves their problems forms the rest of the story. While there is nothing novel about the plot, there is a slight expectation that the presentation might be new.
Before Jagadish enters the village, a few cases of violence due to land issues are shown to us, explaining the issue in the village. Once he enters, he becomes the saviour of the people immediately - saving women from goons, and people from the corrupt ones. All this is completely cliched, to a point where, when a scene starts, you can easily guess what's going to happen next.
In films that focus on family relationships, when there is an important death about to happen, there will be a scene where that person bonds with the hero at midnight, and they drench themselves in nostalgia. The next morning, the important person would be dead. We've seen this trope in countless films, and this one too adds up to the list.
The sole positives of the film lie in Nani's expressions, and the music - Gopi Sundar's background score, and Thaman's rustic folk numbers. Thaman's songs especially paint a vivid image of a village in our minds with just the sounding, and it's too good. The other technical aspects are okayish in nature, and there's not much to complain about.
If at all something new has been tried in the film, it's a twist before the interval that makes you go "Hmm, interesting!" But the dialogues following that reduce the effectiveness of the twist. They are amateurishly written and let down the film at its most important junctures. The film has Aishwarya Rajesh and Ritu Varma as the female leads. Two heroines who've proven their mettle in their previous films. Their characterization is also very weak. They're reduced to roles that just wait to be saved by the hero at the right time.
In many ways, Tuck Jagadish is highly ambitious. It wants to be an action flick. It wants to be a family drama. It wants to be a mass film, it wants to be a film that supports and voices out for the women, and the list goes on. But in each of them, it stops just short of what it wants to achieve, and the reason boils down to the laziness in writing.
When it wants to be a good family drama, the emotions aren't established properly because the characters don't have proper arcs. When it tries to be a mass film, the cinematography doesn't support it. When it wants to voice out for women, the women shown in the film are not able to make decisions for themselves even once. When it tries to explore the romance between Nani and Ritu Varma, the chemistry doesn't quite work.
This lack of innovation makes the audience not worry much about the narrative, resulting in the engagement taking a hit. We don't even find a reason to root for the ones that are subjugated in the village, or the protagonist, who does not get hit even once in the entire run time. With the flaws outweighing the positives, Tuck Jagadish ends up less engaging.