Adavallu Miku Joharlu ends up being more of a melodramatic bore than a comedy drama.

The tagline of ‘It’s All About Woman’ could have easily been Adavallu Miku Joharlu, The lead pair, played by Sharwanand and Rashmika Mandanna, Telugu film Jhansi, brings together Radhika Sarathkumar, Urvashi and Khushboo along with Satya Krishnan, Rajshri Nair and Kalyani Natarajan. Is there enough meat in the script to warrant the presence of all these talented women? We’ll get to that in a while.

But first, the world of Adavallu… Chiranjeevi (Sharwanand) grows up with his mother (Radhika) and his loving aunt. As a child, they strangle him so lovingly that he learns to walk hard to keep them all happy. He’s a nice guy, but he is ultimately disappointed not to find a bride who is approved by them all.

Such a premise can pave the way for a story with a lot of humor. Those raucous moments are few and far between, like a sip of water in a dry throat. For most of the film, an unavoidable television serial mood hangs in the air. The men of the house break the fourth wall at the beginning and inform us that they will appear sometime and the women will come to the centre. That’s why we get many scenes where women dressed in their best clothes and happy joint family women on screen – chop apples or make pickles.

Khushboo compares seven women portrayed as happy housewives as a single mother who runs a small-scale industry and her daughter Aadhya (Rashmika Mandanna), a lawyer. We don’t get to see Rashmika as a lawyer, as the story focuses on her personal life. There is a scene where a woman seeks his help for a matter and another where she looks into her office desktop, just to establish that she is a working woman. No problem.

While we know what troubles Chiranjeevi (out of this there is a big poster of Chiranjeevi gang leader To add credibility to Sharwanand’s character name) Aadhya is unmistakable in the beginning, and with good reason. The story takes its time to establish the growing bond between Chiranjeevi and Aadhya, punctuating it with a hilarious scene where she befriends him at a cafe. In many of these parts, Sharwanand and Rashmika keep us invested in the action.

The entry of Aadhya’s mother should have kicked the story into top gear. But Chiru misses this opportunity by choosing the tried and tested route to enter Aadhya’s mother’s factory. Khushboo’s portrayal of a single mother who doesn’t trust men easily is much more realistic than the other seven women who are portrayed in a clichéd manner. We get a hint of Urvashi’s emotional void and why she pays attention to Chiru. As far as daughters of other women are concerned, is her love for Chiru mainly because she is the only male child in the joint family?

Other subplots ensues as Chiru tries to win Khushboo’s approval. The involvement of Sharwanand and Venela Kishore at a goon’s house while trying to help out a friend guarantees moments of laughter. It’s fun to see Venela Kishore concocting the names of Malayalam movies together to form a vague sentence, before moving on to ‘Manike Mage Heethe’ and signing on as Shyam Singha Roy.

The Chiru-Aadhya play ends only after all the women have spoken their mind. The arguments are well-intentioned – both Chiru and Aadhya put their families first and women, given their family backgrounds, learn to see other points of view. But it gets melodramatic and boring. In between, as opposed to the normality of women in Chiru’s household, we see Jhansi as a bitter single mother. While it’s easy to understand how she makes it, it’s a one-note character that doesn’t wear off as the story progresses.

The film scores in terms of aesthetics, construction design and cinematography (Sujit Sarang), but the script needs some life. Devi Sri Prasad also tries to fill the film with some joy with his music. If only the movie had more humor! There is a pre-interval scene where Urvashi brings down the hall. Underestimating an actor like him feels like a criminal waste.