Review: Peddi — ★★★☆☆

Peddi has a genuinely unusual premise: a village left off government records entirely, its residents without official identity, built around a gifted athlete nobody in power will acknowledge. That's a sharper social hook than most sports dramas bother with, and Ram Charan plays it with a physical commitment that recalls his Rangasthalam work, his best in years.

The film doesn't trust that premise to carry itself. At over three hours, the middle stretch drags through subplots that don't earn their screen time, Janhvi Kapoor's character chief among them, reduced to reactive scenes rather than a real arc. A villain thread simply vanishes for most of the second half and reappears without explanation. The emotional final twenty minutes mostly justifies the patience the film demands, but it demands a lot.

Three stars for a film with a genuinely good idea at its centre and a runtime that never gets disciplined enough to serve it. Ram Charan's performance deserved a tighter edit around it.