Peddi review: Ram Charan goes the distance

Ram Charan spends most of Peddi covered in mud, chalk, or blood, and now and then all three at once. It is the kind of full-body commitment that can flatter a thin film. Here it serves a good one instead, even if Buchi Babu Sana takes his sweet time getting to the part that matters.

Set in the hills of Vizianagaram, the film builds its world around a village so far off the map that it does not appear in any government record. Its people have no papers, no identity, and no railway halt to tie them to the rest of the country. Appalasoori (Jagapathi Babu), the local idealist, spends his life trying to change that and dies with the dream unfinished. Peddi, a cricketer-for-hire who turns out for whichever team pays him, inherits the cause and slowly turns it into a crusade.

What sets Peddi apart in a crowded sports-drama field is its refusal to pick one sport. Charan’s character moves from the cricket pitch to the wrestling pit to the running track, a crossover athlete reinvented every forty minutes. Rathnavelu shoots the akhada bouts and the cricket with real grit and scale, and the physical reinvention across each discipline is the film’s most reliable pleasure. The Uttarandhra dialect lands as lived-in rather than worn like a costume. This is Charan’s best work since Rangasthalam, and the climax, where the performance turns inward and quiet, is where he truly earns the praise.

Charan remakes his body for every sport the film throws at him, and that hard work is the glue holding Peddi together.

Shiva Rajkumar brings a grounded warmth as Gournaidu, the wrestling mentor, and his scenes with Charan give the middle stretch its backbone. Jagapathi Babu, playing the mirror image of his Rangasthalam villain, lends the early portions genuine heft. A.R. Rahman’s score does the heavy lifting in the emotional beats, swelling in at exactly the moments the writing needs a hand.

Not all of it holds. The first hour plays like a template mass entertainer, and the romance with Achiyamma (Janhvi Kapoor) is the weakest thread, loaded up with songs and glamour early, then quietly shelved once the real story begins. The Boman Irani framing device, a sports official hearing Peddi’s life as a flashback, never stops feeling like a contrivance. The screenplay sags in both halves, and you can see most of the beats coming.

Janhvi Kapoor is charming as the village belle, but her track fades out the moment the film finds its real subject.

And yet the last half hour pulls everything together. Buchi Babu, back after Uppena, knows how to land an emotional finish, and Peddi closes on a note that buys back a lot of the patience it spends. Go for Ram Charan. Stay for the stretch where the film finally remembers what it wanted to say.