It’s quite explicit from the title itself that Anant Mahadevan’s ‘Red Alert’ is synonymous to violence. Based on a true incident, ‘Red Alert’ scores with it's true to life characters but the film itself is not a worthy addition to neat entertainers.

Devoid of usual distracting clichés that has crept in most of the violence films, this flick does pack a considerable punch and does have tense moments along the way, even if it lacks in crispness of depth.

‘Red Alert’ is a piece that is thoroughly fictionalizing but done in a realistic way, it carries about it a sense of reality.

Story-line
The story is, obviously, incidental. Set in Andhra Pradesh, the film revolves around a farmer, Narsimha (Suniel Shetty) who becomes a cook to support his family. He earns a pay of Rs 1,500 a month and doesn’t know for whom he is cooking for.

Unfortunately, Narsimha is hunted during a shootout engineered by the Inspector and policemen targeted on the Naxals. The policeman assumes that Narisimha belongs to the Naxals and follows his path, when he goes to the forest to deliver food.

This innocent man, who has a lovely family back home with a wife Uma (played by Bhagyshree) and two kids, gets himself saved by the naxalities in the encounter.

To fulfill his family duty, the cook stays and learns to shoot, and is encouraged to join the group, which he does in the hope to earn some money.

The film has talented artists like Nasseerudin Shah, Vinod Khanna, Seema Biswas, Ayesha Dharkar and Sunil Sinha. The Chief of the Naxals is played by Ashish Vidhyarthi (Velu), while Seema Biswas portrays the character of Saralaka taking care of the women’s cadre. Surprisingly, there is the other talented actress Sameera Reddy portraying an off-beat character, Lakshmi, who gets rescued by the Naxals after been gang raped by the cops.

Lakshmi, thus, joins the revolution as the Naxals motivate her to fight back, where she and Narsimha bond. The incidents in several encounters makes Narsimha to quit the revolution but this turns out not to be easy and it is from here that the series of blood-spattered events begin.

Bottom-line
The screenplay should have been tighter as it doesn’t evoke intensity. However, Aruna Raje who is responsible for the screenplay has created a thought provoking story, and the dialogues stand out. The film engages you because of the ensemble cast.

Watch the flick only for the terrific cast.