Marketed as 'Devara: Part 1' from the start, the latest Telugu action offering starring 'RRR' co-star NT Rama Rao Jr. (or Junior NTR) is both incomplete and overlong. It relies heavily on the superstar's charisma – right down to casting two roles – but director Koratala Siva rarely gives his pirate village saga the seriousness it needs to underpin the actor's attitude and personality. The result is a scattered and often painful mess of macho tropes that fails to recognize its own latent themes and rarely comes to life even on its own terms.

In the vein of Hollywood's “Dune” and “Spider-Verse” franchises, mainstream Indian cinema is experiencing a scourge of semi-films and first installments that are all finished and find no satisfaction. On the Tollywood side alone, 'Devara' joins 'Salaar: Part 1 – Ceasefire' and 'Kalki 2898 AD' as a new film that is bent on inelegantly explaining larger lore rather than letting it play out dramatically. However, while “Salaar” and “Kalki” had the decency to relegate this awkwardness to their second half, Siva's 1996 film (which he also wrote) begins with lengthy discussions about a terrorist conspiracy in connection with the then-upcoming Cricket World Cup Authorities discuss and are subsequently led to one suspect, then another, and so on. However, none of this is relevant to the actual film. The 20-minute introduction seems designed to set up a future sequel, as a police officer is led to an old man sitting wistfully on the bank, who then (mercifully) entertains him with the film's actual story, which takes place entirely in flashbacks .

With that irrelevant context out of the way, the film finally begins with the story set 12 years in the past (and with hints of its own flashbacks to the centuries before), and finally begins with the story of a relatively isolated island community, their De facto boss, The Seafarer Devara (NTR), leads his men in nighttime raids on shipping vessels on behalf of rich smugglers who prefer to secretly smuggle their illegal goods into India rather than deal with the authorities.

Devara, like most South Indian action heroes, possesses fearsome strength and abilities and is surpassed only by his best friend Bhaira (Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan), with whom he has ideological differences. Their culture reveres blades and weapons, which Devara claims are for protection rather than offense, although Bhaira is quick to go on the offensive. This leads to perhaps the film's only entertaining, thematically compelling and visually exciting battle scene, in which Bhaira and most of the village warriors attempt to kill members of the Indian Coast Guard who capture them in the middle of the raid, only for Devara to spring into action as an agent to prevent further bloodshed.

However, the thrill of this pulling and pushing doesn't last. The rest of the plot, while seductively lit, lacks physical weight, and it's not long before Devara falls down a rabbit hole of ruthless fascist violence against his own relatives, whom the film doesn't portray as such. In fact, it grants itself a get-out-of-jail-free card by not revealing Bhaira's motives or those of his followers. As Devera opens a new chapter and forbids them from resuming their smuggling duties, are their objections to his decree purely ideological? Or are they also economical since this was their livelihood? Are your people starving now, or have they had enough? Who is to say that?

Her island may be the visual center of the film, but it has no real thematic or emotional presence. Their rituals are clearly reminiscent of “Black Panther,” with succession determined by hand-to-hand combat between rival villages, but there's no real sense of how their kingdom relates to the outside world, the rest of the country, or even its own people. Visually and narratively, Devara is all noise without meaning.

As with the plot, which features a lone, interesting scene, at the beginning there is only a celebratory dance number that is physically energetic. NTR shows his best as both the powerful Devara and Devara's clownish, far less capable son Vara in the second half of the film, which is set in the '90s. Unfortunately, its misshapen romantic subplot with the comically agitated village girl Thanga (Janhvi Kapoor) is a headache and leads nowhere. Meanwhile, Khan is given the kind of intensity and stature he has rarely been afforded in his Hindi roles of late, but getting used to being dubbed by his gruff Telugu voice actor P. Ravi Shankar might, given Khan's usual disorientation with a lively high – high-pitched voice.

All of “Devara’s” strengths are fleeting, and they rarely compensate for the lengthy three-hour build-up to a climactic cliffhanger that shows the film could have been more interesting from the start if it had decided to play its cards sooner. Instead, it holds her close to the chest and engages in wild filibusters as Devara disappears for extended periods of time, taking every trace of charisma with her.