Ram Charan's Peddi Carries Weak Writing in Mixed Sports Drama

In the Telugu film Peddi, director Buchi Babu Sana reaches for something genuinely meaningful — a story about a lower-caste village's struggle for dignity, told through the arc of one gifted man — but the screenplay cannot hold the weight of its own ambitions. Ram Charan, playing a jaggery factory worker and cricketer from a community denied identity cards and voting rights, delivers a performance of rare conviction, carrying the film through its contradictions with grace. Yet even the most devoted actor cannot repair a narrative that abandons its own threads, mishandles its characters, and mi