Hari Hara Veera Mallu: Part 1 (2025) Movie Review

At long last, Power Star Pawan Kalyan’s Hari Hari Veera Mallu (2025) has arrived. The first glimpse of this movie came out in March of 2021. At the time, it was being directed by Krish Jagarlamudi (Vedam). Since then, for some reason, Krish left the project to work on Ghaati (2025) starring Anushka Shetty, and HHVM was separated into two parts and finished by Jyothi Krishna, son of producer AM Rathnam.

For starters, I want to say that the story of HHVM is conceptually pretty interesting, and the first act establishes some promising setups. However, the execution is all over the place. I don’t know much about the behind-the-scenes drama past the fact that the movie had to switch directors, and the result is a movie that feels very disparate in its two halves.

The most glaring problem is the CGI, which is hard to ignore in the second half, where a lot of shots seemed to have been shot on green screen. There are some cool ideas, but there was clearly not enough budget to see them through. The odd thing is that there seems to have been a lot of time and effort put into editing actors’ faces and bodies, when so many other details needed that VFX attention.

Making movies is difficult, and picking up after someone else’s setup is even more challenging. Not to mention that there was the pandemic that they had to work through on top of that. I simply wish they had maybe just owned up to their constraints and made a more stylized movie. Something to give HHVM its own unique identity. As it is, the film relies heavily on Pawan Kalyan’s star power, but at some point, you have to realize that excessive slow-motion and bombastic music can only do so much.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: the post-Baahubali trend of cliffhangers and sequels has robbed the audience of satisfying conclusions. HHVR is no different, opting to stop the film before any resolution is had, leading to an unsatisfactory ending. On top of that, Hari Hari Veera Mallu spends a lot of time hyping up the antagonist, only for him to nearly die in a CGI tornado. Which does not make me excited to see the face-off in a potential sequel.