I've been seeing so much love for Hi Nanna online, and while I can kinda understand it, I just can't bring myself to really like the film no matter how much I want to. It was okay. Nani was great, the acting was good overall, the visuals were pretty, and the music slapped as usual. It was the writing that could've used some work. I didn't mind the predictability, but the cliches and cringe in the movie were just such a sore.
The story goes like this: Nani is Viraj, a single father. He reads bedtime stories to Mahi, his daughter, but makes sure that none of the stories have a mother character so that Mahi doesn't need to envision one. Mahi keeps asking about her mom though. Some scenes later, Yashna (Mrunal Thakur) saves Mahi from an accident, and when they meet Viraj, he's forced to tell the story of his wife. Here, Mahi asks who she should imagine as her mom, and Yashna says to imagine her.
And so, we get to the first major cliche: The flashback. The story itself here isn't all that original, but that was excusable. Some of the most important scenes here, though, were not written with enough thought or care. They felt outdated at times, and it was not fun to watch. Mrunal's character itself was not deep enough either in the flashback, and it didn't really have much impact. Overall, this wasn't the most enjoyable part of the movie for me.
The second half contained the high points of the movie in my opinion, but it also contained the lowest of low points of the movie as well. The love story in the present progressed nicely, although predictable. It was cute, adorable, and mature, just as such love stories should be. Just as the film re-establishes its amazingness though, an incredibly out-of-place scene would pop up. Its random inclusion just feels so unnecessary and awkward to watch. The first one of those that comes to mind is the scene after the song Odiyamma where Nani and Mrunal are drunk. It was so hard to sit through that scene. You would have to experience it for yourself to truly understand what I mean when I say that it did not fit the tone of the movie whatsoever.
Now suppose I ignore that scene and all the other awkward, overdone cringe. Then the entire movie would be much better, right?
Nope. The ending was awful. It had to be the most cliched scene and the biggest problem with the second half. I can think of the random cringe scenes as odd comedy at least, but the ending was a whole other thing. Somehow, the family she was supposed to get married into had the exact doctors her daughter needed for surgery, and they all showed up at the right time ready to perform surgery. What even are the odds of this happening? Mahi needed some incredibly specific doctors and surgeons on-site, and the people at the wedding fit the exact description somehow. It felt like the ending of a Telugu masala movie from the early 2010s, where they all hug each other and smile at the camera while the credits are rolling. If the ending was different, I think I would've liked the movie better significantly.
While I do understand why the movie is getting so much love, I genuinely don't understand how these issues are being so easily overlooked. I came out of the movie with only those specific scenes and the ending stuck in my head. Of course I wanted to love a Nani movie, and I did enjoy parts of it (most of those parts were in the second half), but I couldn't enjoy it as a whole. Even Nani didn't seem to think the first half of the movie was all that great when he came to the meet-and-greet...
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