Semi-Objectively Judging (Indian) Movies
I tend to be rather outspoken about my opinion on any movie, but particularly Indian movies. Indian movies (primarily Telugu) have been my primary source of media consumpion for most of my life. As a result, it's one of the few things that I feel comfortable forming relatively well-based opinions about. It's 2AM and I'm waiting for my bedsheets to dry, so here's a dump on how I like to judge movies.
Indian movies tend to suffer from either hyperinflated or unfairly-deflated ratings when viewed from the lens of someone more accustomed to western cinema (as their primary source of entertainment). I'm sure we've all encountered some occurence of 'well what moron would believe that you could hit a guy and he would fly back 6 feet'. Aside from the over-the-top action scenes, there tends to be criticism on the primarily "hero-centric" plot of many "masala" movies, and the rather formulaic storylines of "love at first sight" and an almost tsundere romance plot from the perspective of the heroine. Maybe I'm just desensitized to it, but I do think that those are facets inherent to the art form, and I tend to not factor it too much into how I judge a movie (unless the handling of either the action or romance in a movie is especially egregious).
However as it is with most debates on "whether something is good", there tends to be a decent amount of personal opinion involved, so some methodology of analysis generally helps to cast discussion over the quality of a movie into a more objective (or healthy) discussion. Of course there's always the option to simply not discuss what you think of the quality of the movie, but what's the fun in that?
Detailing a Somewhat Sane Methodology
First things first, I like to separate the vision of a movie from its execution. Poor execution might be the result of low budget, uncooperative cast/crew, and all other manner of factors. But a poor vision can make for a bad movie from start to finish, regardless of how well you dress it up. This is the difference between a movie like RRR and 1 Nenokkadine. RRR tends to be publicly touted as "one of India's cinematic masterpieces", but I'd argue it's a perfect example of perfect execution of a poor vision.
The best way to see that might be to imagine what RRR would be if we remove some of the "hallmark" scenes. NTR's clash with Ramcharan with all the animals and water hoses, the final fight with the two against the King, and some of the other more "extravagant" fight scenes. I feel like if you do this (which may be unfair to the film genre, by some people's opinion) then the movie immediately begins to fall flat - the plot is rather lackluster, and the movie overall attempts to justify itself by doubling down on nationalist sentiment. Overall, the vision of RRR is likely a "patriotic spectacle", and it achieves that well, but I don't know if it makes for a good movie, at least by my preference for either good plot or abundant comedy. Definitely makes for good press and eye-candy though.
By contrast, 1 Nenokkadine is a movie where some of the execution is a disservice to the vision. The plot overall is an amazing concept - a schizophrenic musician kills off his parents' murderers, only to realize he hallucinated the murders. The rest of the movie unfolds as he struggles to differentiate what parts of an elaborate conspiracy are fact or fiction. Mahesh Babu puts forward one of his career best performances in the movie, playing the tormented musician. However, the impact of the movie overall is dulled by two big things - poor pacing and plot direction in the latter half of the movie, as well as an overall lack of refinement in the way villain encounters are handled.
Some exceptions are there. The pre-interval scene shows our protagonist kill a primary antagonist thinking it to be a hallucination, only to find out he has killed the culprit in real life. Peak cinema when shown in context. But by contrast, the film is chock-full of dead space like half-baked yacht fight and bridge fight scenes. They act as a filler that don't satisfy the critic, nor the masala-loving filmgoer. The combination of the two factors above are, at least in my opinion, why the movie didn't fare well in the box office. If I were to remake a movie, 1 Nenokkadine would definitely be a top choice on my list of candidates.
As a side note, something that's been irking me about newer movies is a lack of continuous character development or screenplay. One of the bigger examples of this for me recently has been Kamal Haasan's portrayal of Vikram. He has a great performance and the fight scenes are beautiful - the main reasons why the movie fared so well - but his motivation as a character effectively unravels towards the end. We witness the narrative from the perspective of a man attempting to avenge the unjust murder of his son, only to encounter a climax monologue about a drug-free society and no mention of the dead son. The disconnect, especially since it was towards the end, left a sour taste in my mouth, and gave me a negative final opinion on the movie.
Vidaamuyarchi suffered from an opposite problem - it spends about 40 minutes on exposition of why a husband and wife met, married, grew apart, then divorced. This time is all spent incessantly cutting between different flashbacks, in a seemingly random order. I feel that giving these flashbacks in a more orderly manner - for example, recounting the circumstances of their relationship to a divorce lawyer as a conversation - would have made for a much more linear narrative, cutting this exposition to only 25 or 30 minutes. The remaining time could have been used to pace the final stages of the movie better, which felt extremely rushed in the chosen screenplay.
This leads me to believe that the writing and screenplay for movies has been weakening, while the idea and plots still have some originality or quality to them. Though that's just my opinion as a tired amateur - I'm sure experts have done much more in-depth analysis of these things.