Long lost brothers, downtrodden masses, a long forgotten prophecy, and a psychotic drug cartel out for blood, Kingdom plays out with the familiar ethos of umpteen films we have seen.
But the execution is slick, notes Arjun Menon.
Joseph Campbell would be proud today, seeing his famed storytelling formula, 'The Hero's Journey', still being tweaked into worthy pieces in 2025.
No matter how many years go by, or how many film-makers and storytellers tweak the same old screenwriting tenet into different forms, audiences seem to enjoy a well-told story of the 'chosen one' variety.
Vijay Deverakonda's Kingdom is the latest in an assembly line of mainstream films to use the poetics of a reluctant messiah being dragged into freeing a secluded island from its tormentors, after Karthik Subbaraj's wonderfully weird Retro, starring Surya.
Kingdom is a sharper attempt at integrating the spy thriller subgenre with the aesthetics and visual imagination of a chosen one mythic quest.
The film starts in 1920 in the seaside hamlet of Srikakulam, with an ongoing massacre of an indigenous people in a bloody war.
The father-son dynamic from Director Gowtham Tinnanuri's previous film Jersey gives way to a sibling arc in Kingdom.
Long lost brothers, downtrodden masses, a long forgotten prophecy, and a psychotic drug cartel out for blood, Kingdom plays out with the familiar ethos of umpteen films we have seen.
But the execution is slick.
Kingdom takes place in Hyderabad during the early 1990s, and we get a concerned Suri (Vijay Deverakonda), a newly appointed police constable, approaching the cops to have a present day sketch of his missing brother drawn from their only childhood photograph together.
We are given glimpses of Suri's hot-headed ways early on, and this irreverence to authority makes him a mark for a senior official looking for a rogue agent to carry out a deadly spy mission in a faraway island, filled with an immigrant population chewed out by India and deserted at the Sri Lankan border.
The hero soon makes his entry into the godforsaken island, where women are not allowed to enter the mainland, and people are silently putting up with the brutalities of the local mafioso and his maniacal son, who make them carry drugs in exchange for their survival.
Novel story ideas and beats are bogged down by the busy screenplay hurrying to set out the stakes.
Suri finds his long-lost brother Sathya (Satya Dev) on the island, leading a conformist life, accepting his fate as the doomed leader of the masses who have long forgotten to fight for themselves.
The scenes when Vijay Deverakonda and Satya Dev share the screen -- especially the way the two awkward brothers try to reconnect after years of being away -- are well drawn out.
The beautifully understated cinematography by Jomon T John and Girish Gangadharan strips the film of any artifice, and things look real.
Anirudh lifts the somber mood of the subject matter with an epic soundscape that transports you to the kingdom of Suri. But with all the technical efficiency, the writing is a little too safe to make the film the truly wild swing that it could have been with more emotion and stakes.
Murugan, played by Malayalam actor Venkitesh, adds potency to the villainy of the film that would have ended up as a rehash of better psychotic avatars from numerous films.
The latter half comes alive when Venkitesh comes on screen, and you feel the sense of irksome unpredictability as to what he is going to do in a particular scene.
Bhagyasri Borse is not given much to do in the larger scheme of things.
Kingdom, on a writing level, could have used more polish. The evident lack of story seems obvious towards the end, where the events are wrapped up in haste.
The final images hint at a sequel with new players ready to hunt down Suri.
Kingdom Review Rediff Rating: 
© 2026