Prabhas’s much awaited film, Honourable King It is about the search for a missing grandfather. Throughout its three-hour runtime, the audience discovers much more than just Dadaji. They look for plot coherence, character depth, genuine scares or consistent entertainment value – all that is required for every film. Like the movie hero wandering through a haunted castle, you may feel like you lack clear direction or a completely satisfying destination.

Honourable King It starts with Raja (Prabhas) staying with his grandmother Gangamma, played by Zarina Wahab. Gangamma is suffering from Alzheimer’s and only remembers her missing husband Kanakaraju (Sanjay Dutt) and her grandson. She tells Raja to keep searching for his missing grandfather, who often appears in his dreams.

Eventually, Raja gets a clue about Kanakaraju’s whereabouts and goes to Hyderabad to find him. After a series of mysterious incidents, the king ends up in a haunted palace that belongs to Kanakaraju. What is the history behind the palace? What do Gangamma’s dreams indicate? Will Prabhas meet his grandfather? The film explores these questions over the course of an excruciatingly long three hours, littered with stale ideas.

Director of Maruti Honourable King This is an atrocious film that lacks basic storytelling. While the story mentioned above may sound like a good horror comedy premise, Maruthi’s screenplay does everything to kill even the interesting ideas and turn them into a loud, useless and dull film. Honourable King Exorcism, hypnotism, occult activities and exploration of the supernatural – all in one film. The result: a muddled script that isn’t cohesive or interesting enough to hold attention.

Any horror comedy follows a template: there’s a sentiment, there’s a flashback, there’s a hero-heroine’s redemption arc. Each film is now different in how it uses this template to its advantage. However, Honourable King Even fails to use the basics. The story suddenly moves from a village to the outskirts of Hyderabad, so aimlessly that you are left scratching your head throughout the film.

Prabhas plays a good-hearted, funny guy, but his character doesn’t have enough depth to make you feel attracted to him. For example, he lives with his grandmother, and together they search for his grandfather. But what happened to his parents? Why does Raja live with his grandmother? Many key questions remain unanswered as the story jumps from scene to scene with sudden cuts that would put even a novice to shame.

When the story shifts to the haunted palace, you see the king, his associates and three heroines hosting a costume party. Even though they are afraid of the spirits inside the palace, they still don’t forget to dress up in their attractive sarees, perfectly ironed, Pinterest-worthy outfits with bows and makeup. After a point, Honourable King Almost seems like a joke.

Be it the sticky visual effects, the green-screen sequences, or even Prabhas looking artificial with all the effects on him – everything looks shoddy. The intention is not to let down Honourable King Completely. But after spending Rs 400 crore on a film, the output hardly justifies the scale of the project.

Honourable King Shows lines of promise when it features the involvement of hypnotism and exorcism. But they have just been given names without exploring their full potential. Prabhas’s comedy timing works at many places, and the hospital scene is an example of how to elevate a major idea into an innovative concept. Except in one or two places, Honourable King Even the basics are rarely used.

Malavika Mohanan, Nidhhi Agerwal and Riddhi Kumar are criminally underutilized, reduced to mere decorative props with no significant character arc or meaningful contribution to the narrative. Honourable King It also suffers from poor editing which highlights the flaws in the script.

Honourable King Wastes its Rs 400 crore budget on a muddled script that jumps aimlessly between genres and locations. Despite Prabhas’ sporadic comic timing, the film lacks depth, cohesion and basic storytelling. What could have been an entertaining horror comedy becomes a strange, absurd three-hour ordeal that disrespects both the audience’s intelligence and the cinema itself.