Liger

What do you get when you combine one of the Telugu film industry's brightest up-and-coming actors with one of its highest-profile directors? Unfortunately, in the case of Puri Jagannadh’s Liger the answer is a project unworthy of either, as the film careens haphazardly between tones with little interest in creating a coherent experience for the audience. Touted as one of the biggest fall releases from South India, Liger fails to live up to the standards of either star or director and instead winds up as a below-average potboiler too reliant on local tropes to feel fresh for Telugu film veterans or welcoming for newcomers.

Liger (Deverakonda) is the son of a chaiwala (tea seller) who has moved from Telangana in South India to the big city of Mumbai in the hopes of becoming a great MMA fighter. Behind him every step of the way is Balamani (Krishnan), his mother and the widow of a great fighter who died in the ring. Named Liger by his parents to celebrate the fact that his father was a lion and his mother a great tigress, he feels duty bound to live up to their reputations. People don’t take him seriously because he suffers from a profound stutter that makes communication difficult; however, when some local hoods try to sack his tea stall, he shows that his fighting skills are no joke.

It’s set up very early on that Liger will do a lot of fighting, not only with his fists, but also with his speech impediment and his own naivete as the country bumpkin is repeatedly exposed to the sinister machinations of city life and fast women. Before too long he crosses paths with would-be social media star Taniya (Panday), whose only ambition is to reach 1 million likes on Instagram by any means necessary. Sadly, the character never gets less vapid, though somehow their relationship becomes one of the main through lines of the film, which is a real downer because it is never believable and Taniya is just the worst.

Eventually, after a number of scrums with a local competitor, Liger’s martial arts coach (Roy) manages to send him to an international MMA competition in Las Vegas. The film spends the final 40 minutes in this setting, which simultaneously provides the most impressive fight scenes in the film and the ultimate undoing of any goodwill Deverakonda’s character might have built through ridiculous plot twists and an outright abandoning of the plot in the final reel to squeeze in a Mike Tyson cameo.

With its strict adherence to the worst habits of Telugu mainstream filmmaking, Liger fails to engage the audience in any meaningful way, instead falling back on dated tropes and poor directorial choices. Numerous songs pop up out of nowhere, almost completely devoid of connection to the story and none even bothering to take place in anything approaching the reality of the film. The action, plentiful though it certainly is, only really impresses during the MMA sequences, and even then is saddled with completely unnecessary wirework.

The actors are burdened with ridiculous dialogue, emphasized by frequent echoing effects that turn over-the-top performances beyond that threshold to straight-up comical. It’s just a mess, and that’s not even counting the big battle sequence set at a location (bar? gym? who knows!) called De Las Putas that would make anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Spanish language cringe until they died. Did I mention that this fight scene is between Liger and a dozen women? Think about that.

Puri Jagannadh is one of Telugu cinema's most active filmmakers, and over the last decade he’s made a career making action potboilers, but even with that low artistic bar, Liger falls flat. Deverakonda, who became one of India’s biggest stars after 2017’s Arjun Reddy – a film clumsily referenced here as a wink to the audience – is clearly talented but hamstrung by this attempt at hero worship. The music is bad, the story makes no logical sense, Mike Tyson’s late-stage cameo is an insane mess that derails the whole plot, and then the movie just ends. No resolution, just credits.

I suppose that last bit is a mercy to the audience, but it’s too little, too late. This Liger never roars – in fact, it can barely muster a purr in one of the year’s most disappointing big-star vehicles.