A day after a bruising Telugu premiere, Nani's action drama opened in Tamil Nadu to reviews ranging from two stars to unexpected praise for its emotional stretch.
Srikanth Odela's 'The Paradise' had its special Telugu premiere last night. The Tamil version rolled out in theatres today, and if the reaction on X is anything to go by, this one's going to be argued about for a while.
Early word out of the Telugu premiere, and from Tamil screenings that ran in the US ahead of the local release, wasn't kind. Several reviewers on X compared the film unfavourably to another recent big-budget disappointment, tossing around the word "toxic" as shorthand for a film that overpromised and underdelivered. One reviewer handed it just two stars, saying the director loses his grip after the interval and never quite figures out what the second half is supposed to be doing.
That's a rough comparison for Odela, whose last film 'Dasara' is still the benchmark fans are measuring him against. More than one X post argued that whatever made 'Dasara' click, be it the writing or the control over tone, is missing here.
Not everyone's writing it off
Not every review landed in the trash-it pile. One netizen pushed back hard on the pile-on, giving the film 3.25 stars and arguing that 'The Paradise' isn't just an action vehicle but a film that builds out an emotional world around Nani's character, one strong enough, in this viewer's telling, to carry the whole runtime.
Reviewer Christopher Kanakaraj landed somewhere in between. His post singled out the first twenty minutes, the interval block and a scene involving a character called KCR as the film's high points, while flagging that Nani's attempt at a mass hero avatar doesn't fully land, and that the comedy villain track, the emotional mother-son scenes and Gayathrie Lohar's dummy subplot don't work as written.
On Gayathrie Lohar herself, there's rare consensus. Reviewers across the split kept coming back to her as the one thing everyone can agree on, with more than one post saying she goes further with the glamour quotient than she did in 'Immortal' and that her scenes alone are worth the ticket price, even for viewers who otherwise walked out disappointed.
There's also a claim doing the rounds among fans on X, and it needs a caveat. Some viewers are saying the makers skipped a theatrical trailer altogether because they anticipated exactly this kind of reaction, and that the production got an interim order from a Bengaluru court aimed at restraining negative reviews. That's a claim circulating on social media for now, not something confirmed by the production or verified independently, and CutMirchi will update if there's an official word on it.
What's certain is that 'The Paradise' now has two very different word-of-mouth tracks running in parallel, Telugu and Tamil, and the weekend numbers will settle which one the box office actually believed.
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