Ustaad Bhagat Singh Review and Rating – Pawan Kalyan, Sreeleela

Ustaad Bhagat Singh opened in theatres on March 19, 2026, carrying the weight of a 14-year reunion between Pawan Kalyan and director Harish Shankar, the duo whose 2012 blockbuster Gabbar Singh remains one of Telugu cinema’s most beloved mass entertainers. That reunion is, ultimately, both the film’s greatest asset and its most persistent problem. Rating: 3 / 5.

What Is Ustaad Bhagat Singh About?

The film follows Bhagat Singh, an orphan raised by a teacher named Chandrasekhar Rao, played by KS Ravikumar, who eventually rises to become Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh. When a targeted attack threatens the CM’s life, Bhagat Singh, now a street-smart force of nature, steps in to uncover and dismantle the conspiracy. The villain at the centre of the plot is Nalla Nagappa, played by R. Parthiban.

In between the action and drama, Harish Shankar’s script gives Pawan Kalyan a consistent platform to deliver lectures on depression, relationships, love, life, religion, and patriotism, all coated with a layer of raw comedy. It is a difficult balance to sustain, but because the material comes naturally to the star, it rarely collapses into cringe. What it does instead is float along on charm when it should be propelling the story forward with momentum.

How Does Pawan Kalyan Perform in Ustaad Bhagat Singh?

This is unambiguously a one-man show, and Pawan Kalyan knows it. He arrives in form: the trademark mannerisms are intact, the screen presence is commanding, and the punchy one-liners land with the ease of a star who has done this before and knows exactly what his audience came for. At a pre-release event, Harish Shankar described the film as showing “a side of Pawan Kalyan sir we haven’t seen in a decade,” and in isolated moments, that holds. There is genuine warmth in his comedy stretches, and the emotional beats, while functional rather than moving, benefit from his presence.

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What the film cannot quite disguise, though, is that the star is doing the heavy lifting for a script that has not kept pace with either him or the audience. Pawan Kalyan covers the flaws with style, but the style is doing all the structural work. When the material thins out, and it does repeatedly, the gap between star and screenplay becomes hard to ignore.

What About the Supporting Cast?

Sreeleela plays the bubbly girl who falls for the hero, a role type she has played in multiple films and handles with ease. The problem is that everything the promotional campaign promised about her, particularly her dancing ability, barely materialises on screen. A glimpse is all audiences get. Her most famous physical attribute as a performer is almost entirely left off the table, a puzzling creative choice given that Harish Shankar is a director known for presenting stars at their best.

Raashii Khanna features mainly in the first half in an entertainment track that does not fully land, disappears through much of the second half, and is given no meaningful space in the film’s emotional architecture. R. Parthiban as the villain Nalla Nagappa is presentable and professional, but the character lacks the meat needed to make him a credible counterforce to Pawan Kalyan’s screen presence. The face-offs between hero and villain are fine, nothing more. Rao Ramesh and Satyam Rajesh do their reliable bits in the supporting cast, while Gautami is underutilised in a role that deserved more screen time. KS Ravikumar, whose character as mentor-turned-CM is central to the story’s engine, registers warmly.

What Works in Ustaad Bhagat Singh?

The second half finds its footing more consistently than the first, and a specific stretch involving the heroine briefly lifts the film’s emotional temperature above its flat baseline. The action sequences carry Pawan Kalyan’s body language effectively, and the comedy, when it lands, is genuinely entertaining rather than forced. The pre-release event revelation from Pawan Kalyan himself about the remix of Ee Manase from Tholi Prema (1998) built enormous fan anticipation, and the song’s appearance on screen delivers the nostalgic charge it was designed to. The video song Dekhlenge Saala is the album’s best moment on screen, backed by grand visuals that justify its placement in the film.

What Does Not Work in Ustaad Bhagat Singh?

The first 30 minutes are rushed and cramped, moving through setup at a speed that robs the narrative of emotional investment before it has even begun. The interval block, which should be a moment of genuine impact given the film’s story mechanics, fails to land with the force it needed. The presentation throughout the film reads as dated, constructed using templates that felt fresh in 2012 but now carry the weight of a decade of Tamil and Telugu commercial cinema that has evolved well past them.

The subplot involving a religious community angle has been noted by several critics as feeling artificially inserted, as though it exists primarily to create situations for specific dialogue rather than arising organically from the narrative. The villain’s arc, a recurring weakness in Harish Shankar’s mass entertainers, repeats the pattern here. Parthiban is given a character without sufficient backstory to generate real threat. And the closing act, while acceptable in its mechanics, lands without the final emotional punch the film needed to make its two-hour-plus runtime feel fully earned.

How Does the Music Hold Up Compared to Gabbar Singh?

Devi Sri Prasad composed the songs, and the Harish Shankar-Pawan Kalyan-DSP combination that produced Gabbar Singh’s beloved soundtrack is back on paper. In practice, the gap between expectation and delivery is the most discussed disappointment of the film’s technical package. The album does not produce the run of banger songs that Gabbar Singh delivered. DSP notably skipped the film’s pre-release event, an unusual absence for a film of this scale. Thaman S‘s background score follows the current trend of loud techno-driven BGM, competent and serviceable, but as one audience reaction on X put it directly, it amounts to “Thaman doing an Anirudh kind of work.” The Ee Manase remix is the one moment of genuine musical nostalgia that fully connects.

How Does Ustaad Bhagat Singh Compare to Gabbar Singh?

The comparison is unavoidable because the film itself invites it. Harish Shankar has described Ustaad Bhagat Singh as something of a spiritual sequel to Gabbar Singh, and the structural similarities are visible from the character introduction through to the comedic register. But where Gabbar Singh (2012) had a sharpness and irreverence in its writing that made it feel alive even in its most formulaic moments, Ustaad Bhagat Singh is constructed with less urgency. It was shot in approximately 40 to 45 days, and that compression occasionally shows in the seams. At the pre-release event, Pawan Kalyan expressed his hope that “UBS achieves success on the scale of Gabbar Singh.” The gap between those two films in terms of narrative freshness is the honest answer to that wish.

Ustaad Bhagat Singh is not a bad film. It is a film that works exactly as designed, for one specific audience, and does nothing much beyond that. Pawan Kalyan’s fans will find the moments they came for. Everyone else will find a mass entertainer built on a decade-old blueprint that the rest of Telugu cinema has long since moved past. On Netflix, where it will land around April 24, 2026, it will find its second and likely larger audience. That streaming crowd, unbound from opening-weekend expectation, may well be the best fit for what Ustaad Bhagat Singh actually is: a comfortable, old-school star vehicle that knows its lane and stays in it.