RRR was a worldwide sensation last year, the biggest crossover in Tollywood history and now the third-highest grossing film to ever come from India. If you haven’t seen it, you probably know the Oscar-winning song “Naatu Naatu” from its viral dance sequence, which is certainly the highlight of the film. It’s a whole lot of movie, running three hours and bouncing across genres, including action, bromance, musical, and more, much of which doesn’t work, but at its heart it’s a revisionist revenge fantasy (like Django Unchained or Inglourious Basterds) that tries to have fun, and that’s when it works the best. (It’s streaming on Netflix.)

The core plot of RRR is pretty simple – an English colonial governor visits a Gondi village with his wife, and she takes a shine to a girl of about eight or nine, so she and her husband kidnap the kid, paying a few coins to the mother as compensation. Eventually, we meet Bheem (Tarak, also credited as NT Rama Rao Jr.), the tribe’s guardian, who swears to get the girl back, posing as a Muslim man in Delhi to try to infiltrate the governor’s house. Meanwhile, Raju (Ram Charan) is a soldier in the Raj’s employ who shows incredible courage and fighting skills, even against his own people, and is tasked with finding Bheem before he can pose a danger to the governor. Raju and Bheem meet without knowing the other’s identity and become best friends, but we know this can’t last and the two find themselves in conflict multiple times during the film before coming together near the conclusion. Everything else is ornamentation – this is a bromance driven by the kidnapping and rescue plot.

RRR is extremely entertaining, especially given its length (although it could have been a half hour shorter, if not more), but you have to accept it on its own terms. The action sequences are hilariously over the top, and these two men should be dead fifty times over by the time it ends – it’s like a Marvel movie in that way. Raju is impaled on a tree branch at one point, both men are stabbed more than once, both are bludgeoned, Bheem is severely flogged, and both go flying through the air high enough to break a few ribs at the last on impact. This is just how RRR rolls, and I laughed along with the absurdity of it. There’s even a bit of the horror-movie gambit where you are invited to enjoy a good kill here and there, usually when the victim is a colonial soldier or authority figure who’s been openly racist earlier in the film, and I have to admit a couple of those even worked for me. (When Edward finally gets what’s coming to him, it’s extremely well done – the reveal there is quite clever.)

That suspension of disbelief starts to crumble outside of the action sequences. I have no issue with the film’s depiction of almost every English person (save one) as a moronic asshole, given the Crown’s racist and repressive policies towards people who had existed without the white man’s help for millennia, but it does function as a plot convenience too often – it’s less fun to see your heroes outwit a group of simpering idiots than to see them defeat more worthy foes. There are smaller details that also seem unnecessary, such as when one of the heroes is held in solitary confinement and nearly starved, but somehow manages to exercise and become more muscular in the process. I understand the desire to turn these two into supermen, but this feels like an LCD Soundsystem album, where every song with a good hook goes on twice as long as it needs to.

There’s an extended flashback in the middle of the film that explains Raju’s character and arc at great length, a conceit that Amsterdam used and that tanked that film’s story. It’s more effective here, and far more necessary, but again goes on way too long, and the way the story jumps to the past, back to the present, and then a good while later returns to that flashback to finish the story is sloppy. That could have been much tighter while still providing the essential back story.

The two lead actors are pretty great, though – both can command the screen when they’re on it, both exude charisma, and the way they work together on screen whether their characters are friends are foes is the movie’s strongest asset. I’d watch a whole series of movies where these two solve crimes or take out petty English tyrants, especially with a well-choreographed dance number or two. Both men are already stars in India, and I can see why. There isn’t much room for anyone else, although it’s worth mentioning that the governor’s wife is played by Irish actress Alison Doody, who played the villainous Elsa Schneider in the third Indiana Jones film.

RRR won one Oscar this past week for “Naatu Naatu,” although the performance during the awards ceremony didn’t include any actual South Asian dancers, which seems like an unforced error for the Academy. India submitted another movie for the Best International Feature Film honor, The Last Film Show, a movie about how great the movies are, which meant RRR was ineligible for that award. I know many critics and fans felt that RRR deserved a Best Picture nomination, but I can’t get over that line. This is a fun movie, and an entertaining one, but I don’t think it passes that higher level of scrutiny – it’s sprawling and disorganized, often ridiculous, and engages in a lot of trickery to make the plot work. I still ranked it higher on my own list than than All Quiet on the Western Front, Elvis, or Triangle of Sadness, but I can name ten other films I would have put in the BP category over this.