Lancha Saamraajya (The Kingdom of Corruption) starts off well as a satire with the devil of corruption taking on a crusader called Dattanna.
Devil tells Dattanna that he will fail in his mission to eradicate corruption and end up as a loser despite putting up a good fight. But as the film progresses, you find that director Boodal Krishnamurthy wants to make one more run of the mill commercial film.
To add to the misery, you have two item songs followed by two sexy numbers. Thankfully, the dialogues written by Chaithanya Prabhu have some substance. But you need to have immense patience to sit through the film.
Lancha Saamraajya is a collage of several incidents. In a sense it runs like a teleserial with many stories running in different tracks. There is no continuity as every story ends in a sequence except for the one involving the Chief Minister -- a lustful sadist who kills an actress after she refuses to succumb to his demands.
It seems Boodal Krishnamurthy is in a time warp and has followed the narrative style of the sixties and the seventies. This may be one reason why the narration looks highly dramatic. Perhaps to justify the dramatic narrative style, he has selected only theatre artists for the leading roles.
Master Hirannaiah tries to be as natural as he could in the film. Umashri is also stylised. Both Simha and Umashri have given good performances.
Meanwhile, veterans like Keerthi, Shivakumar, Aravind and even the reliable Ramesh Bhat have overacted in the film.
Camera work by Basavaraju and music by Raju Upendrakumar, son of the late Upendra Kumar is good.
On the whole, a very pedestrian effort.
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