Ever since the success of her film Mantra, Charmi started doing films that have ‘different’ story lines, though none of them worked. Nagaram Nindrapothunna Vela is no different from amongst them.

What’s it about : Niharika (Charmi) is a young journalist working in a Telugu News Channel. After being chided by her boss for bringing ‘boring’ news, she starts looking for some controversial material. For this purpose she ventures out alone in the night into Hyderabad. Unknowingly, Niharika has a pen camera, which happens to capture a secret talk of a politician, which if it could come out, will dismantle his status. He sends his men after her. Niharika in the mean time starts looking at Hyderabad’s dark secrets during the night. She also meets Prasad (Jagapathi Babu) who is a drunkard with a good heart, and along with him tries to solve the political problem. How things turn completely against her and how she overcomes the difficulties form the rest of the story.

What is Good : Charmi tries to bring some honesty to her character. Some dialogues on few current issues are listen worthy. Jagapathi Babu’s character has been written with some attention to it. On the whole it seems somewhere there was some honest intention from the filmmakers to make a movie on the nexus of news channels, politicians, policemen and goons. However, good intentions don’t necessarily mean a good movie. Nagaram Nidrapothunna Vela suffers from innumerable problems

What is bad: Right from the start, Nagaram Nidrapothunna Vela never rises above B-Grade film. The premise of a ‘young journalist’ bravely venturing alone into the city late in the night is very questionable. For a girl who seems to carry a pen camera, she doesn’t carry a mobile phone! Inspite of being chased by goons many times, almost raped by police, she doesn’t mind walking back onto the road alone – that attitude may be called fire brand-ish in the film; in reality it would be called being stupid! A forced love story between Charmi and Jagapathi Babu, doesn’t help the cause of the movie, nor do the many unnecessary songs. To add to the horror few scenes are directly inspired from movies like Traffic Signal (Hindi), Vedam etc. It would be no exaggeration to say that we are just about getting started on ‘what’s bad’ so far – such bad was the film’s treatment.

It is very rare that a film seems like it has been dragging right from the start to the end. One wonders how Charmi or Jagpathi Babu agreed to do this movie.

Technical Departments : The technical side of the film has nothing noteworthy to mention. One can probably appreciate the fact that the film was shot mostly in night, and there was never a problem with lighting. The background music sometimes sounded like it had more emotion to convey than what was happening on the screen. Screenplay was a bore, dialogues were just about okay, and the direction was pathetic.

Bottomline : Nagaram Nidrapothunna Vela is so boring that it will put you to sound sleep. Watch it if you are suffering from insomnia.