Kandireega

Kandireega (transl. “Wasp”) is a 2011 Telugu romantic action comedy directed by Santosh Srinivas and produced by Bellamkonda Suresh under Sri Sai Ganesh Productions, starring Ram Pothineni, Hansika Motwani, Sonu Sood and Aksha Pardasany, with music by S. Thaman. Released on 12 August 2011, it was a commercial success and was later remade in Bengali as Paglu 2 (2012) and in Hindi as Main Tera Hero (2014). Our record lists a running time of 160 minutes.

What the story is about

Sreenu is a street-smart high-school dropout from Anakapalli who wants to marry his uncle’s daughter Bujji, but she turns him down because he has no college education. So he heads to Hyderabad to study, beating up a gang of rowdies who harass college girls on the train along the way. At college he falls for Sruthi, only to discover that Bhavani, a city gangster, is obsessed with her and is blackmailing her into marrying him. Sreenu responds by challenging Bhavani that he will make Sruthi fall for him instead, and things get far more complicated when another gang leader, Rajanna, enters the picture with plans of his own for Sreenu.

Cast

• Ram Pothineni as Sreenu, alias Kandireega
• Hansika Motwani as Sruthi
• Sonu Sood as Bhavani
• Aksha Pardasany as Sandhya
• Jaya Prakash Reddy as Rajanna, Sandhya’s father
• Chandra Mohan as Viswanatham, Sreenu’s father
• Suhasini Maniratnam as Snehalatha
• Raghu Babu as Intelligence Officer Avataram
• M. S. Narayana and Dharmavarapu Subramanyam as Sreenu’s uncles
• Srinivasa Reddy as Sreenu’s friend
• Brahmanandam in a cameo
• Swati Reddy as Bujji (guest appearance)

Making of the film

The project was first announced in October 2009 with Ravi Teja in the lead and Krishna Vamsi directing, as a partly fantasy film; Tamannaah Bhatia and Sneha Ullal were considered for the heroine. The fantasy elements were dropped, and in April 2010 it emerged that the producer and Ravi Teja had fallen out, and Ram replaced him. Shooting began in October 2010 with Ram and Hansika Motwani. According to Wikipedia, an attack by Telugu film fighters on Tamil technicians on the film’s set in Chennai in December 2009 triggered the Telugu film industry strike of 2010, which halted shooting across Andhra Pradesh for weeks. Composer Chakri was replaced by S. Thaman in March 2011.

The audio was launched at Taj Deccan in Hyderabad on 14 July 2011 with Venkatesh as chief guest. The song “Champakamala” was originally composed for Dookudu.

Reception and box office

Jeevi of Idlebrain.com gave it 3 out of 5, calling it “a mass masala movie with ample entertainment”, and The Times of India said that though the story “isn’t too original”, it is “an out-and-out entertainer”. Sify, listing the top Tollywood hits of 2011, puts its distributors’ share at ₹22 crore. Zee Telugu won the satellite rights over Gemini TV, and the film was later dubbed into Hindi as Dangerous Khiladi 4.

Where to watch Kandireega

We do not have a confirmed streaming platform for Kandireega on file. The OTT details on this page will be updated when a platform’s own listing confirms it.

Sources: the Wikipedia article on Kandireega and the reviews and reports it cites, linked above; our own cast and crew records.