Cast: Sidharth Malhotra, Parineeti Chopra
Director: Prashant Singh
What’s it about:
A young goon named Abhay Singh (Sidharth Malhotra) kidnaps grooms greedy for dowry and forcefully marries them off to the same girl, who they reject for dowries. But he is no Robinhood because he does this for a ransom from the girl’s family. However, when his bachpan ka pyaar Babli (Parineeti) makes a comeback in his life, all hell breaks loose.
Review:
Welcome to the dowry-hungry town of Madhopur in North India’s Bihar that seems to thrive only on the shaadi business. Here even the most bumbling moron has a 50 lakh price tag for getting married. But the solution to the problem of dowry is another problem – that of grooms being kidnapped in broad daylight and forcefully wedded to the girl. This apparently is a real problem in parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and the filmmakers feed on it to make a comedy that soon turns into a senseless tragedy.
For starters, you’d have a hard time believing that Bollywood’s dapper dude Sid Malhotra is a trigger happy goon, who is much above the law. In his ‘small town’ get up of floral shirts and tight pants, he looks straight out of a college fancy dress competition running for the Student of the Year trophy, perhaps. The film’s leading lady too is always well put together in designer dresses, literally, standing out as the brightest, but not so much in the brains department. She is called Babli Bomb because she thrashes her boyfriend in broad daylight, willfully gets kidnapped by the goons and is always in the middle of planning her own wedding, with different grooms each time. While Parineeti gets the Bihari accent bang on, her character is so flaky that you never quite connect with her. The film’s hero is equally eccentric, forever confused and so gullible that he thinks his kidnapping business is pure and pious (LoL). Character actors like Sanjay Mishra and Javed Jaffrey lend more heft to their roles than the lead pair.
Thankfully, there were a few good jokes land in the first half, but if you’ve seen the trailer you’d know the punches. That still makes it breezy and fun to watch. Even the second half starts on a promising note but soon the narrative freefalls into a never-ending loop of melodrama and bizarre proceedings. Blame it on poor writing.
The film tries to give a message about important societal issues with humor and sarcasm but fails to keep you entertained throughout.
In one of the scenes, Abhay Singh says, ‘Yeh Bihar hai…yahan ke aadhe se zyada logo ko nahi pata woh kya kar rahe hain’. This line pretty much sums up the feelings of those watching this jabariya (forced) entertainer.
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