If just minutes after watching a film, one can’t remember the name of the lead character played by Athulyaa Ravi, it is clear that the role is as inconsequential as it is forgettable. This holds true for the rest of Meter too, as the lack of originality is only outweighed by the absence of coherence. Everything in Meter, a righteous corruption drama held together with tonally inconsistent doses of comedy and age-old cliches, gives it an appearance of a parody film much like the Scary Movie series or our very own Sudigadu. However, Meter does not intentionally satirise its source material, and that is why chortling my way through the film’s multitude of gaffes seemed like the only way to cross this bridge.
Director – Ramesh Kaduri
Cast – Kiran Abbavaram, Athulyaa Ravi, Posani Krishna Murali, Sapthagiri
Kiran Abbavaram’s Arjun Kalyan is the child of an honest police officer, who is on the receiving end of transfers and even physical abuse at the hands of a politician. Of course, this politician becomes the principal antagonist as fate has different plans in store for a young Arjun, who vows to never become a police officer. Years later, Arjun becomes the SI of Cyberabad Police Station even though a previous scene suggested he was taking charge of the Panjagutta station. From there, Meter becomes all about Arjun’s machinations in trying to lose the khaki only to find him getting better at it… Cyberabad’s Shikari Shambu, if I may.
But Arjun Kalyan is the hero right… right? So, a near-dead father and a long-overdue realisation later, Arjun Kalyan turns over a new leaf as he tries to stop a serious recruitment scam with the near-impossible knee-jerk actions last displayed by Brahmanandam’s Kill Bill Pandey from Race Gurram. Meter also has a shockingly bad romantic subplot, where Athulyaa’s character (I am still trying to figure out her name) is shown throwing acid on the faces of multiple men before meeting Arjun Kalyan, following which the camera does what a camera does best in films like these – excessively zoom in on the woman’s body parts, playing to the gallery by amping its vulgarity. Politics is a talking point in Meter, political correctness… not so much.
A son’s rise to redemption from corrupt beginnings could have probably made for a decent film in the hands of a more able team. But the makers of Meter don’t even trust their own screenplay, and opt instead to double down on its editing to narrate its story in the most unsubtle of ways. Even the weakest of mass films can sometimes be salvaged by some heavy-duty performances, but Kiran Abbavaram fails to rise to the occasion. The rest of the cast also don’t create much impact, barring the sidekicks of the protagonist and antagonist, who do most of Meter’s comedy heavy lifting. The film's overly rhyming dialogues make the film slightly less boring, but they can only do so much to save this messy debacle.
Meter attempts to join the longstanding tradition of English words getting an entirely different meaning in colloquial Telugu usage (lite, rod, sketch, bus stand). There are many dialogues to the tune of “ee meter ki adjust chestha, mana mass meter lo untamu et al” but it is best to close this review by paraphrasing Mean Girls’s iconic Regina George, “Stop making Meter happen”.
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