They Call Him OG (2025) Movie Review

As someone who enjoyed Saaho (2019), I have been waiting to see what Sujeeth did next. What started out as a collaboration with Ram Charan ended up as a project with his uncle, Power Star Pawan Kalyan. They Call Him OG starts with a cold open and follows one of the coldest title cards ever with almost an hour of exposition and buildup. Some cool conflicts are frequently interjected with characters narrating flashbacks to one another and occasional AI imagery.

The work of DP Ravi K. Chandran is striking. However, the AI visuals do diminish from the practical visuals. The AI insert shots are mostly for the establishing shots, and they are neither convincing nor comparable to the shots before and after them. Thankfully, a blend of fast editing, good stuntwork, and a booming score from Thaman creates lots of hype moments. Even as a non-Power Star fan, I can’t deny that the movie has peak aura at times, and if all you want is a collection of mass elevations, OG is a fun time. It’s when you want to dig deeper that you get into trouble.

The core concept of They Call Him OG is intriguing, but it’s too overwritten for its own good. If you’ve seen Sujeeth’s previous films, it’s no surprise that the movie is brimming with plot twists, but it OG also adds plenty of metaphors about forests and fires, tigers and wars. This type of hyped up dialogue kills the movie, and at a point, you want characters to have meaningful conversations with each other. Cutting some of those sequences out would have elevated the impact of the rest.

The last thing I want to talk about is a minor spoiler, though it’s not at all surprising given the direction of the industry. They Call Him OG ends with yet another sequel tease that is completely unnecessary, and all it would take would be editing out a few scenes and throwing up the end credits a little bit sooner to make it one finished package. But no, we gotta bait a second movie in case this one makes a lot of money. When movies have big budgets, the expectations shouldn’t just be big collections. It should also be a higher quality product that justifies the high ticket prices audiences are expected to pay.