90 ML - Movie Review

What’s it about?

Devadas (Kartikeya) is born with a fetal alcohol syndrome and a doctor advises the parents to give him 90ML of alcohol daily thrice. That is the only medicine this disorder has as per the doctor. Trouble begins when he grows up to be a young man. Despite achieving 90 percent marks in his studies, corporate companies refuse to provide him a job as he is an ‘authorized drinker’. When he rescues a child in an incident, his dare-devil act goes viral, a girl named Suvasana (Neha Solanki) befriends him and falls in love with him eventually. She and her family don’t like the smell of alcohol. To win her love, he manages to cover his ‘90ML’ dose for some time but when she and her dad (Rao Ramesh) learn that he can’t live without 90ML of alcohol dose, hell breaks loose, break up follows. What happens next is the story. 

Analysis

A quick search on google brings the results about this ‘Fetal alcohol syndrome. It is a condition in a child that results from alcohol exposure during the mother's pregnancy, says Google. Thanks to this movie, we learn about this syndrome. Picking up rare medical conditions/disorders to narrate a story has been a regular trend in Telugu movies from the past few years. New director Yerra Sekhar Reddy has chosen to tell about this so-called ‘90ML’ problem in a boring and utterly nonsensical way. For him, this syndrome serves only to come up with outdated mass moments. 

Kartikeya is introduced in typical mass movie style when someone helps, he appears into the frame, drinks his 90ML, bites a KFC chicken piece, and beats up a few men. The scene is at a wedding place. The groom is beaten by the people when they learn that he drinks too much. Kartikeya tells the people to present there that only people who have never tasted an alcohol drop in their entire life can have the authority to beat the groom. The camera pans to the men and women present there and all raise down their heads including the bride. Then Kartikeya looks directly into the camera and mouths this dialogue: “Liquor limit lo unte… body horsepower unlimited (If you drink in permissible limits, your body energy will be unlimited)” and goes for an introduction song. This is a standard introduction of a mass hero, right!

Such outdated dialogues and sequences follow to the end. Heroine Neha Solanki is also introduced in a typical way: hero sees her at first when she is controlling traffic at a junction as a good citizen and he falls for her instantly. She is a physiotherapist and her father named her as Suvasana because he doesn’t like bad smell like ‘alcohol’ and her sister is named Aveshitha (angry girl), she is trained martial arts. 

After this setup, we will get to a couple of fight sequences, two songs, and some comedy involving Baahubali Prabhakar and villain Ravi Kishan (his name is John Wick). It goes on a template manner.

The story, screenplay and the narration by Yerra Sekhar Reddy are clichéd and formulaic. Despite the fact the film deals with a rare syndrome, the narration goes on a template way. 

There is nothing much to talk about performances. Kartikeya has tried to present himself as a mass hero. Neha Solanki is okay. Ravi Kishan, Pragati, and others are in their usual shelf. The music of Anup Rubens is pretty ordinary. Cinematography is neat. The writing and direction are totally bad. 

Bottom-line: ‘90ML’ lacks kick. In fact, by the end of the movie, you look for Tea or Ninety come out of this boredom. Such a lousy movie with formulaic narration.