Note: I won’t be reviewing this movie because it doesn’t deserve one given its treatment of women.
Plot
Apart from the problematic romance, it is a rural sports-action drama set in 1980s Andhra Pradesh. The story follows a passionate villager who uses his physical strength and love for sports to protect his village’s pride and stand up against a greedy landlord who is exploiting them.
On paper, it sounds great. It is a gritty 1980s sports drama about a villager fighting a greedy landlord. However, the filmmakers completely ruin it by treating women like garbage. Commercial cinema is notoriously bad at this, but the first half of this movie is genuinely shocking and pathetic.
The Relentless “Male Gaze”
Instead of giving Janhvi Kapoor an actual role, they reduce her to a piece of meat. The camera practically drools over her, constantly zooming in on her chest and navel during songs like ‘Chikiri Chikiri’ just to get whistles from the crowd. Shruti Haasan’s cameo gets the same trashy treatment, and the film even throws in a crude boner joke that makes you want to walk out of the theatre.
The camera work feels not just outdated but downright predatory. Treating actresses like objects and expecting the audience to laugh at such “locker-room humour” is just pathetic.
But wait, there’s more to it. The most disturbing part of Peddi is how the lead actor, Ram Charan, behaves. In any realistic setting or the real world, he’d be arrested as a stalker and a sex offender. He literally sneaks into the heroine’s dark bedroom and kisses her without consent, right after talking about how badly he wants to touch her. To make it cheaper, the film immediately cuts to a flashy song to normalise the assault, and when she confronts him, he blames it on his “love language”.
Let’s be real: the “hero” is a predator and the filmmakers are straightaway glorifying him. Packaging a sexual assault in a musical number is a sickening low, even for a mass commercial movie.
Normalising Stalking And Calling It “Love”
Shockingly, she just accepts this trash excuse and hugs him. While physical touch is a real love language, it requires mutual consent. Showing a man enter a woman’s room, kiss her in the dark, and rewrite harassment as romance sends a terrible message to society, especially in a country where the concept of consent is still deeply misunderstood by many. Also, this is pure gaslighting, where the so-called hero/stalker gaslights his victim into hugging him. This is not romance; it’s toxic propaganda and it is terrifying that filmmakers are still teaching men that boundaries don’t matter.
A Sudden Shift In The Second Half
Strangely, after the intermission, the movie completely transforms. The creators suddenly remember they were supposed to be making a sports drama and drop the love angle to focus on the actual plot. Basically, the makers wasted the first hour on the usual misogyny “masala” before finally doing their jobs.
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Why The First Half Can’t Be Ignored
However, a good second half doesn’t excuse the toxic first half. One can’t disagree that movies shape how people behave, and when such big stars participate in movies that glorify assault, they tell the audience that boundaries are a joke. Also, a sane viewer can’t just forget how badly the heroine was degraded. Peddi might succeed as a sports drama at the very end, but its celebration of harassment has left a bitter and unforgivable taste. The makers don’t get a pass for an exciting climax after spending an hour rooting for a predator. They should be ashamed for using their massive platforms to normalise behavior that puts women in danger.
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