'Seethamma Vakitlo Sirimalle Chettu' is a story about two brothers, Venkatesh and Mahesh Babu, who have different mentalities. Their father, Prakash Raj, brings them up with good values but Rao Ramesh believes the father and sons don’t know how to adapt to the modern day sensibilities and are still living in the past. Do old school values triumph?

Venkatesh as the older brother, has a very difficult role to play here. His character is one dimensional and remains so till almost the very end. It isn’t the kind of colorful character that one falls in love with instantly but you are constantly irritated with him. He must be commended for taking on the role and doing justice to it. His performance before interval and in few scenes post interval is a proof of his controlled but well calculated acting skills.

Mahesh Babu is easily the highlight of the film. His character is such that it is easy to fall in love him and delivers his lines with good timing. Every time he's in the frame, he lightens up the screen. There is nothing to dislike in this character - it’s so well written.

Prakash Raj too has a one dimensional character, very much like Venkatesh's. He uses all his experience and gives depth to his performance. In the climax, the actor shows his class with a simple scene that is emotionally engaging, instead of hammering the audience with sappy feeling.

Anjali is the next on the list as far as performances go. She plays a naive character, overacts and her voice gets irritating. Still, her character makes the right impact at crucial times.

Rao Ramesh has a small, but very pivotal role in the film. He is the opposing moralistic force, who could almost be considered as a negative character that has to be defeated. He pitches the character well and leaves the desired impact.

Finally, Samantha is just there to provide the glamour quotient. Her role isn’t memorable, apart from a few scenes with Mahesh Babu.

Jayasudha, Kota Srinivas Rao, Tanikella Bharani and Ravi Babu have decent roles and do their work in a routine fashion.

Positives
Mahesh Babu’s performance
Scenes of Mahesh Babu with Venkatesh
A few scenes of Mahesh Babu with Samantha
The positive message

Negatives
Everything else

The film begins slowly by introducing all the characters doing their daily routine and picks up pace with the introduction of Mahesh Babu’s character. He brings energy into the narrative with his presence and it’s good going till the interval.

Post interval, the tempo is maintained well till the first song is over, but after the completion of the song, the graph of the film completely nosedives. The song in this half featuring Venkatesh and Anjali is completely unnecessary and looks forced. The film finally shows some moments of spark in the climax with Prakash Raj telling his sons about his values and subsequent realization by the sons of their misunderstandings.

Director Srikanth Addala, who also provides the screenplay and dialogues, succeeds very well as the dialogue writer, but fails on the screenplay front, which is very inconsistent. However credit must be given to the director for extracting nice performances from the principle cast members of the film.

Music for the film by Mickey J Mayer is alright, with the title song being the best. Background music by Mani Sharma too is very good and it gives the right feel when required. However there are large portions of film where there is a complete silence and this should have been handled better.

Cinematography is very good, editing could have been better and production values by Dil Raju are neat.

What to do?
It's a one man show by superstar Mahesh Babu and this is the only reason you should watch the film

Rating: 3/5