Review: ‘Mana ShankaraVaraPrasad Garu,’ starring Chiranjeevi, Venkatesh, Nayanthara and Catherine Tresa

January 18, 2026

by Carla Hay

“Mana ShankaraVaraPrasad Garu”

Directed by Anil Ravipudi

Telugu with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in India, the action comedy film “Mana ShankaraVaraPrasad Garu” features a predominantly Asian cast of characters (with a few white people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: A national security officer with an anger management problem has conflicts with his rich estranged wife and the wealthy mining mogul who becomes her fiancé.

Culture Audience: “Mana ShankaraVaraPrasad Garu” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners and long-winded and repetitive action comedies.

“Mana ShankaraVaraPrasad Garu” is the type of movie that didn’t need to be 156 minutes long. This mindless and long-winded action comedy, which has an obnoxious national security officer for a protagonist, quickly becomes a repetitive bore. The movie heinously tries to make child abuse look like slapstick comedy.

Written and directed by Anil Ravipudi, “Mana ShankaraVaraPrasad Garu” takes place in various cities in India, where the movie was filmed. “Mana ShankaraVaraPrasad Garu” translates to “Our Mr. Shankara Vara Prasad” in Telugu. Shankara Vara Prasad is the name of the movie’s main protagonist.

In “Mana ShankaraVaraPrasad Garu,” Shankara Vara Prasad (played by Chiranjeevi) is a national security officer who has held various positions in law enforcement in India. In the beginning of the movie, he is described as “cutthroat” and “stoneheaded.” Shankara also has a nasty temper, which gets him into trouble in all aspects of his life. Shankara lives with his unnamed single mother (played by Zarina Wahab), who absolutely adores him and thinks he can do no wrong.

When the movie begins, Shankara has been working for the past five years as the chief security officer for union home minister Nitin Sharma (played by Sharat Saxena), a member of parliament (MP), who overlooks Shankara’s flaws because Shankara is supposed to be the “best” security officer available. Nitin is the person who recommends Shankara for a very different job that Shankara has for about one-third of the movie.

While Shankara is a national security officer, he leads a team of four other security officers, who follow him around like loyal pets. Jwala (played by Catherine Tresa), Narayana (played by Harsha Vardhan) and Mustafa (played by Abhinav Gomatam) are the only three of these four sidekicks who speak in the movie. Jwala has the most dialogue, and her role is mainly to be the sidekick who praises Shankara the most.

One day, numerous thugs kidnap Nitin, Shankara and Shankara’s sidekicks. Shankara unrealistically defeats all of these criminals by himself through fake-looking stunt fighting and gun shootouts. Nitin is so grateful, he tells Shankara: “I love you, Prasad. You are like my family.”

This comment triggers Shankara to tell Natin his sob story about how he lost his wife and kids in a bitter breakup that happened six years ago. Shankara and his wife are separated but not officially divorced. The movie then goes into a long flashback mode to show how this marriage and separation happened. It’s supposed to make Shankara look more sympathetic, but it really exposes him as an abusive jerk.

Shankara’s estranged wife is Sasirekha, nicknamed Sasi (played by Nayanthara), who is the daughter of a wealthy business mogul named G.V.R. (played by Sachin Khedekar), who never approved of Shankara because G.V.R. wanted Sasirekha to marry a man who is on the same socioeconomic level or higher as she is. Sasirekha was supposed to marry someone else in an arranged marriage, but she ditched her groom at the wedding before taking any marriage vows, and she ran off with Shankara instead, who was a guest at the wedding. Yes, it’s that type of movie.

Sasirekha works in G.V.R.’s company as a high-ranking executive. After she and Shankara got married, G.V.R. hired Shankara to work at the company in a sales position. But G.V.R. had an ulterior motive: He made Sasirekha do a lot of traveling for her work, knowing that her time away from Shankara would put a strain on their marriage. This manipulative scheme works. Sasirekha and Shankara have an increasing number of arguments with each other because he thinks that she’s neglecting him and her home responsibilities.

During the time that Shankara and Sasirekha’s marriage reached a breaking point, they were the parents of two children under the age of 5 years old: daughter Nikki (the older child) and son Vikki. Shankara figures out that G.V.R. purposedly made Sasirekha spend a lot of time far away from home, in order to ruin the marriage. Shankara gets into a heated argument with G.V.R. in front of several employees at the office. This argument culminates with Shankara slapping G.V.R. hard in the face.

Sasirekha is horrified and demands that Shankara make an apology to G.V.R. on another day. This apology meeting also takes place at the same office, with many employees watching in the background. Instead of giving an apology, Shankara gets even angrier. He ends up slapping G.V.R. and Sasirekha hard in their faces. This abuse is the last straw for Sasirekha, who breaks up with Shankara and files a restraining order against him.

As part of the separation agreement, Sasirekha gets full custody of Nikki and Vikki, who are not allowed any contact with Shankara. As the kids grow up and are able to understand what happened to their parents’ broken marriage, Nikki (played by Khushi Soni) and Vikki (Ooha Reddy) are told that Shankara is a violent loser who doesn’t care about them. In other words, the kids are taught to fear and hate Shankara.

Here’s where the movie starts to get really stupid: Shankara tells Nitin that Nikki and Vikki currently attend a boarding school, where Shankara hopes to sneak in to see them. Nitin suggests that Shankara should instead get a job as a teacher at the school. Shankara easily gets a job as a physical education teacher at the boarding school because Nitin sent a letter of recommendation to the school’s principal (played by Vadlamani Srinivas), who is skeptical about hiring Shankara due to his lack of experience as a schoolteacher, but the principal is swayed by this recommendation letter from this influential politician.

The boarding school scenes are excruciatingly bad, as all of the cast members strain to be comical in very unfunny scenarios. Nikki (who is bossy and angry) and Vikki (who is passive and easily charmed by getting junk food as gifts) haven’t seen Shankara since they were too young to remember him, which is why they don’t know at first that this new teacher is really their father. Shankara doesn’t use any disguises, although this part of the movie uses lot of the same ideas from the 1993 movie “Mrs. Doubtfire,” a far superior comedy about a divorced dad who disguises himself as a female housekeeper/nanny to be closer to his kids.

Nikki is about 10 or 11 years old, while Vikki is about 6 or 7. It’s hard to believe that these kids wouldn’t use the Internet to find out what their own father looks like, out of curiosity. We’re supposed to believe that Nikki and Vikki have been so brainwashed to hate their father, they don’t care to know what he looks like. The movie also wants viewers to assume that somehow, Sasirekha was able to keep all photos of Shankara away from the kids. Shankara looks exactly the same when he starts working for the school as he did when he Sasirekha broke up.

A few of the scenes with the boarding school students involve kids getting assaulted by adults, who slap children in the face or punch the kids in other areas of their bodies. The filmmakers of this garbage movie want viewers to laugh at this child abuse. There’s also an awful sequence where Shankara has conflicts with a bratty student named Sugunesh, whose main purpose in the movie is to be fat-shamed when he becomes a nuisance to Shankara. It’s disgusting filmmaking that shouldn’t be condoned.

Of course, Shankara’s plans to go “undercover” in this boarding school inevitably fall apart, as Sasirekha, Nikki and Vikki find out about Shankara’s ridiculous scheme. “Mana ShankaraVaraPrasad Garu” then has a bloated and very irritating stretch of the movie about Shankara having a rivalry with Sasirekha’s arrogant fiancé Venky Gowda (played by Venkatesh), a wealthy mining mogul who used to be Shankara’s colleague in law enforcement. There’s also an idiotic subplot about a revenge scheme involving a kidnapping and attempted murder. Sudev Nair has a supporting role as a police inspector named Virendra Panda.

“Mana ShankaraVaraPrasad Garu” is an example of how certain movies glorify toxic abusers, who think they can redeem themselves just by killing people who are considered more dangerous. It’s an awful way to make movies, especially when these types of films are just overblown junkpiles of exploitative violence, atrocious dialogue and horrendous acting performances. Cutesy song-and-dance numbers that are thrown into the mix do not erase the cinematic stink of these types of putrid movies.

Sarigama Cinemas released “Mana ShankaraVaraPrasad Garu” in U.S. cinemas on January 16, 2026. The movie was released in India on January 12, 2026.