SHAHID! You’re back! Finally! This movie is a beautiful thing for any Shahid Kapoor fan who has been waiting years to see him in anything good*. It’s completely his movie. It’s Sashapalooza. He’s in almost every frame, making faces and emoting and I laughed my pants off.
*Are there any other kinds of Shahid Kapoor fans? The lucky ones who don’t know he did anything besides Jab We Met?
I have no idea why this is getting bad reviews. It was hilarious. There wasn’t a big crowd at the theater, but everyone seemed to be really enjoying it, so it was a lot of fun. I’m still confused by their trend of showing a post-intermission trailer-- I’m not sure if that’s an Eros thing or what, but we got Krrish 3, which was cool on the big screen. At least it wasn’t the horrible mood-killer that the Bajatey Raho trailer was in the middle of Lootera.
Shahid Kapoor plays Vishwas Rao, whose widowed mother Savitri (Padmini Kolhapure) has only one dream: to see her only son become an honest police officer. Vishwas, naturally, has only one dream as well-- he wants to be a film star. Despite this, they are close and their relationship is very sweet. (They have a song!) Padmini has the filmi maa thing DOWN, by the way. She has all the appropriate feelings, all the right dialogues, everything turned up to 11, but she’s still a unique character with backstory and everything. Plus she’s always ready to tuck in her sari and go after thugs when necessary. When you come down to it, their relationship is what drives the film and both Shahid and Padmini are excellent in portraying their slightly silly, but ultimately good characters. Honestly, it’s one of the most enjoyable family dynamics I’ve seen on screen in a while. Savitri has dreams for her son, but really she just wants him to be happy. Vishwas isn’t a mama’s boy, but he’d still do anything for her just because she’s his maa and he loves her. This does mean that the romance track in the movie kind of takes a backseat, but that’s okay. It’s a lot more satisfying to see the hero in emotional turmoil over the plight of the mother instead of the girl who randomly jumped on the back of his scooter at the beginning of movie.
This brings us to Kajal (Ileana D’Cruz). She’s a social worker on a quest to find one honest cop in Mumbai, and when she spots Vishwas in a rented police uniform (he’s sneaked off to Mumbai to try his luck as an actor) she thinks she’s found her man. Of course, he’s much more interested in chasing down Salman Khan (in a hilarious, delightfully self-referential cameo as himself that’s worth the ticket price right there) than chasing the bad guys. But Vishwas turns out to be pretty fantastic at beating up goondas and rescuing young women in distress, usually by hilarious accident.
Naturally, all this thug-beating catches the attention of some inept drug smugglers and their mysterious criminal mastermind. Vishwas is trying to convince them that he’s really not a police officer when Savitri comes to Mumbai and he has to convince her that he is. Things get more and more out of hand, in the most glorious ways. It does go drama-masala for a while after intermission, but that completely worked on me, although I did giggle at Mere Bina Tu, with the extra desolate landscape and Ileana’s impossibly long dresses sweeping over the sand.
It took me a while to warm up to Ileana. I thought she might have been better cast in Barfi and I certainly wonder what somebody like Rani Mukherjee would have done with the role. I wouldn’t have picked her as that suited to comedy, but she does pretty well, and she’s really enthusiastic-- she looks like she’s having fun.
Okay, yeah, this is the ending credits song, where anything goes. But still. Shahid arriving via backpack propellor accompanied by ladies with jellyfish umbrellas really deserves a mention.
All the songs are twice as good as the promos make them out to be, except of course for Dhating Naatch, which is in fact exponentially worse on the big screen. It was kind of amazing the way uncomfortable silence fell on the theater during those few minutes. Shahid tried, he really did, but nothing could save that song. Even the filmmakers kept cutting back to Shahid or zooming in on random Nargis body parts hoping to distract us from her complete inability to dance or construct reasonable facial expressions. It’s just so inexplicable. Anyone would be a better item girl than Nargis Fakhri. Johnny Lever would be a better item girl than Nargis Fakhri.
It was packed with filmi references and deliberately campy, but in a very affectionate way that Yash Raj and things like I Hate Luv Storys just can't duplicate. Overall, it was a great time in a world where one banana peel can stop a criminal, an aspiring actor can accidentally become the best cop in Mumbai, and a mother’s love will always triumph.
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