Prashanth Neel does not make films. He builds mythologies. KGF gave him a canvas and he painted something operatic on it — a working-class revenge fantasy so maximalist it barely fit inside the frame. Salaar is bigger. Whether it is better depends entirely on your appetite for world-building that prioritises scale over coherence.
The film takes place across multiple timelines and two countries and involves blood oaths and ancient kingdoms and the kind of violence that has been choreographed to feel like religious ritual. Deva — played by Prabhas with the particular stillness of a man who knows the camera will come to him — is a figure of almost mythological destructive capability, and the film spends most of its running time establishing the scope of what he can do before asking why he is doing it.
Prithviraj Sukumaran, as Vardha, is the film's most interesting creation. His is a different kind of power — political, accumulated, institutional rather than physical — and the film is most alive in the scenes where these two modes of dominance come into contact. The friendship-that-must-become-enmity structure is familiar from any number of Indian epics, but Neel stages it with genuine conviction.
The action is extraordinary. Whatever else you say about this film, and there is much to say, the staging of its violence is inventive and committed in ways that most action cinema is not. Neel films fighting as though it is choreography, which it is, and does not hide that fact.
Part One ends, as it must, on a cliff. Part Two has much to explain.