Three reviews of Don't Trouble the Trouble out on release day agree on one thing: child actor Ssara Palekar and a beagle named Snoopy are doing more work than the screenplay.
Don't Trouble the Trouble hit Telugu screens on Friday, October 2, and the reviews landed within hours of each other with the same basic conclusion: this one's uneven, but it's got a heart.
Shashank Yeleti's fantasy comedy, backed by Baahubali producers Shobu Yarlagadda and Prasad Devineni along with SS Karthikeya, and presented by SS Rajamouli, follows Suri, an ambulance driver with a habit of cutting corners. Oneindia Telugu's review describes him as an orphan who swindles a local gangster, Aslam Bhai, played by Mahesh Manjrekar, and then has two days to come up with Rs 25 lakh. The Hindu frames him more simply as a grey character who takes shortcuts without the usual sob story to explain why. Either way, Suri's mess gets a lot more complicated once he meets Divya, a child who mistakes him for a real magician and turns out to have powers of her own.
All three reviews, from The Hindu, Onmanorama and Oneindia Telugu, single out the same stretch as the film's best: the pre-interval portion where Suri, Divya and her puppy Snoopy are simply figuring each other out. Onmanorama called Fahadh's work here "built less on big dramatic gestures than on reactions," and credited the film's grounded, musical-tinged visual style, aided by Kaala Bhairava's score, for keeping that first half watchable.
The trouble, so to speak, starts after interval. Oneindia Telugu points to a slow investigation track that drags the second half down. Onmanorama says the film loses interest in the Suri-Divya relationship once goons and fight scenes take over, calling those stretches "narrative obligations rather than organic developments." The Hindu is gentler about it but agrees the magic tricks get repetitive and the Old City portions around Charminar lean on stock characters who never generate real urgency.
There's also a shared complaint about loose ends. Onmanorama notes the screenplay leaves several things unexplained in ways that feel like writing gaps rather than deliberate mystery, especially once the climax asks the audience to invest emotionally without having earned all of it. The Hindu agrees the ending turns melodramatic, though it says the arc still lands an emotional close for both lead characters.
Where the three reviews converge hardest is on the performances. Fahadh Faasil, in his first Telugu film as a solo lead, gets consistent praise for comic timing and his own Telugu dialogue delivery, even as The Hindu notes his diction can occasionally distract. But the real discovery, across all three pieces, is Ssara Palekar. The Hindu calls her "a terrific find." Oneindia Telugu singles out her chemistry with Fahadh and her mix of innocence and flashes of temper. Technically, Brad Francis's cinematography and Kaala Bhairava's music draw praise, while Oneindia Telugu flags Praveen Antony's editing as a place where tighter cuts would have helped the pacing.
No single review calls Don't Trouble the Trouble a hit or a miss outright. The consensus, such as it is, lands somewhere in between: worth a watch for Fahadh and Ssara, less convincing as a complete film. Whether that's enough to carry it through the weekend box office is the next question, and one none of Friday's reviews were built to answer.
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