A film showing love story between a paper boy and rich girl is not your everyday love story. Usually, such subjects are tackled in Tamil where the directors treat them sans the fluff of a commercial drama. But in Telugu, directors add elements to suit the commercial format that sells here, instead of taking a realistic view.

Though the director seems to want to present a poetic version of his class less love story, the film does not exactly fall into this category. And just to please the audience, the paper boy is also a mechanical engineer who turns a paperboy. 

Instead of trying to add his touch, the director works on what has been provided to him in terms of content and this kind of leaves the film with an identity crisis of sorts.

It is neither a hard hitting film on the lines of recently released Dhadak nor is it a mass masala entertainer of 80s where autowalas too get to prance around with rich babes.

Where the film gets serious, Bittiri Satyam is used, killing the momentum instantly. Also, the director compromises in various scenes to make it appealing to audiences, which is where the film falls flat.

The scene where the heros parents go to heroines house or when heroines brothers go to heros house are intense and well presented.

Where you might end up hoping to watch a film like Marathi hit Sairat or the recent Dhadak in Hindi, Paperboy ends up being a pale version which fails to raise above everyday story telling.

To add to all this, the love track itself feels very old school. At times, the audience feels like the hero and heroine are blindly following some lines they might have read in romantic novels or classics.

In all, Paperboy fails to touch your hearts. Despite having good scenes, it does not go full on in showing what it wants to say. So one ends up with the feeling of reading an old newspaper instead of fresh news.