Peddi buries its powerful story about caste identity and social inequality beneath hero worship, regressive romance and exhausting excesses, bemoans Sreeju Sudhakaran.
Key Points
- Peddi, directed by Buchi Babu Sana, attempts to highlight caste discrimination and the struggles of an oppressed tribal community through a sports drama.
- Ram Charan delivers a physically committed performance, while Shiva Rajkumar emerges as the film’s strongest supporting presence.
- Excessive hero glorification, a poorly written romance, objectification of its female lead and increasingly absurd plotting undermine the film’s stronger ideas.
Imagine this scene. You are a girl alone in your room. The lights go out.
You hear a prowler inside your room. He grabs hold of you and kisses you without your consent. Then, taking advantage of the darkness, he leaves, abandoning you to tears and humiliation.
Now tell me, is that prowler a bad man?
Or is he the hero of this story?
If your answer is the latter, then congratulations, you are ready to meet Peddi.
What’s Peddi About?
Chastised by the sports minister for failing to produce medal-winning athletes, a sports official (Boman Irani), while on a tour, comes across a village in Andhra Pradesh teeming with sports-loving youngsters.
When asked about their inspiration, most of the locals offer a single answer: Peddi.
Confused yet intrigued, the official agrees to trek through forests and hills to meet the man.
Along the way, his guide narrates the story of Peddi, beginning in the early 1990s and revealing how he became a local legend.
Good Ideas Stuck Within Routine Storytelling
Peddi is directed by Buchi Babu Sana, whose debut film Uppena revolved around a love story set against the backdrop of caste oppression.
Caste politics once again forms the thematic backbone of his latest film.
And in that sense, the story of Peddi feels appealing in its bare-bones format; in fact, it is the kind of premise you instinctively want to support.
It follows a man determined to give his village an identity and a place on the map by securing a railway station for his hamlet, using his sporting talent as the vehicle to achieve that dream.
The fact that the protagonist belongs to an oppressed tribal community, and that the film highlights the discrimination and hardships they endure at the hands of neighbouring upper-caste villagers, makes his mission even more compelling.
At least on the surface.
Peddi is also essentially a sports drama. And for a sports drama to truly click, its protagonist must feel like an underdog.
The problem is that our hero is only an underdog because of his social identity. In every other aspect, he is practically a superhero without the super-soldier serum.
Give him a cricket bat and he can smash every ball for a six, some of them apparently travelling across multiple grounds. The planes probably avoid flying over his village for safety reasons.
Give him wrestling and he can dhobi-pachad anybody, even while fighting on an injured leg.
Give him a race and, well, you can probably guess the outcome.
When you make your hero this overpowered, all tension evaporates from the sporting contests.
The only way left to generate excitement is through exaggerated heroics, whether in cricket matches or wrestling bouts.
It strips away the groundedness that the story desperately needs. Something Mari Selvaraj pulled off with aplomb with his Tamil film Bison Kaalamadan that came out in 2025 and had a similar setting.
Problematic Portrayal of Its Heroine
But Peddi is a Telugu commercial entertainer, albeit one layered with a strong social subtext, and therefore a certain suspension of disbelief is expected.
What is less forgivable is how distracted the film initially becomes by Janhvi Kapoor’s midriff and whatever other anatomy it can display while still clinging to its U/A certificate.
I genuinely felt sorry for Janhvi. Not because her acting has suddenly improved (it hasn’t), but because the film appears interested in little else other than her anatomy, when it comes to her character.
The camera’s obsession with objectifying her body, aided by revealing costumes, becomes increasingly uncomfortable to watch.
And all this for a role that barely matters to the larger narrative. Remove the haphazardly inserted romance altogether and Peddi becomes a slightly more focused, streamlined film.
Slightly.
BTW, the opening paragraphs of this review describe an actual scene from the film.
After he forcibly kisses the heroine in the dark, Peddi later justifies his behaviour by claiming that people from his community only know how to express love through physical contact.
I do not know whether Janhvi cringed while reading that portion of the script, but I certainly squirmed in my seat watching it unfold.
And I have not even touched upon the needless item number featuring Shruti Haasan, awkwardly squeezed into a film that already overstays its welcome at more than three hours.
A Ram Charan Show All The Way
If the camera was obsessed with sexualising Janhvi, it was then totally heads-over-heels in love with Ram Charan’s physique.
Given that a major portion of the film revolves around wrestling, it allows the actor ample opportunity to appear shirtless, and his physical commitment to the part certainly deserves appreciation (he isn’t bad in the dramatic scenes too).
It is not merely the camera either.
The screenplay itself is so obsessed with glorifying the hero’s ruggedness that almost nobody else gets much room to shine.
The lone exception is Shiva Rajkumar, who is excellent as Gour Naidu, Peddi’s wrestling mentor.
Everyone else is either reduced to growling villains or supporting players tasked with injecting excessive melodrama into the proceedings.
Divyenndu Sharma, for instance, has very little to do as one of the antagonists except be a distilled version of Mirzapur‘s Munna Tripathi, and his sudden change of heart in the climax is never adequately explained.
Jagapathi Babu is almost unrecognisable as one of Peddi’s fellow tribals who dreams of bringing a railway halt to their village. His character comes with genuinely compelling motivations, but the heavy-handed treatment robs much of the emotional impact.
The film gains a promise of momentum with Shiva Rajkumar’s arrival and becomes sparsely interesting when Peddi, exhausted by the constant mistreatment of his people by both the police and upper caste villagers, decides to train under Gour Naidu.
The wrestling sequences, however, are a mixed bag.
The first major bout, where Peddi takes on two opponents in a local competition, is wildly over-the-top. The idea of combining his eccentric batting style with wrestling techniques simply does not land, particularly because his cricketing exploits are already cartoonishly exaggerated.
The second major contest, staged at a national-level championship, feels far more grounded and is reasonably well executed, at least until the film once again succumbs to excess during its final stretch.
The Over-Melodramatic Third Act
Not that the writing leading up to these moments is particularly remarkable. But it begins to feel masterful when compared to what follows afterwards.
In its desperate bid to pile more sacrifice and suffering onto Peddi’s journey, the screenplay goes completely off the rails in an overextended third act.
The twists are clearly designed to provoke the audience emotionally. Instead, they provoke bewilderment and, at times, unintentional laughter.
The ludicrous manner in which Peddi’s transition from wrestling to track racing takes place is the most glaring example of the film’s melodramatic writing. The climactic race carries about as much dramatic weight as Janhvi Kapoor randomly dropping the pallu of her sari for the camera.
The irony is that the climax eventually allows the hero to raise some genuinely important points about the inequalities faced by scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. But by the time the film arrives there, it has taken such a bizarre route that the message loses much of its force.
Which is a shame, because Peddi actually has something worthwhile to say.
Unfortunately, it spends far more time worshipping its hero’s aura (and objectifying the heroine) than trusting the strength of its plotline.
PS: It was disappointing to see A R Rahman following the Ravi Basrur school of scoring, flooding scenes with loud background music whether they need it or not.
And the only good thing about his forgettable songs was Ram Charan’s hyper-energetic dance moves in them.
