Sunday, December 27, 2015

Dilwale (2015)


First things first: Kajol. Kajol Kajol Kajol Kajol. In case anyone was not aware that she’s the most beautiful woman on the planet, she is, in fact, the most beautiful woman on the planet. DO MORE MOVIES KAJOL I HEART YOU. Seriously, go watch Mehndi Laga Ke and then Gerua and tell me she has aged a single day. (And then try to work out that sympathetic crick in your neck after watching her do all those backbends.)


Second: This movie was not as good as I wished it could have been, but it was better than I was expecting. We are all here for the SRK-Kajol jodi anyway, right? And on that front, it delivers. It delivers the same thing we’ve seen a billion times before, but when we’re depending on Rohit Shetty for the delivery, he does well to avoid too much innovation.

Third: The promo picture is inaccurate. There are no gigantic wrenches in the movie. All wrenches are normal-sized.


But anyway, first Veer (Varun Dhawan) falls in love with Ishita (Kriti Sanon) in an embarrassingly overacted sequence of events. I really like Varun Dhawan. I also really think he needs a certain type of director to bring out the best in him. Luckily he kind of mellows out as the movie goes on and while Manma Emotion Jaage is really annoying, his first fight scene is extremely satisfying. Veer works for his brother Raj (Shahrukh) in a car mod shop. This is basically an excuse for the movie to show a billion fancy cars. When Veer gets beaten up after fighting some drug dealers, we find out that Raj has A Secret Past that he’s hidden from Veer, where Raj was called Kaali and was a bad-ass gangster. Apparently 10 year old Veer never noticed when his older brother changed his name.

But Kaali meets Meera (Kajol) when he is a criminal careening around Bulgaria, but it turns out that she also has A Secret, which leads to A Betrayal, and 15 years later he meets her again, because it turns out that Ishita is Meera’s sister, and Meera won’t allow her to marry Veer unless he denounces his brother. Ishita and Veer don’t know about the murder and betrayal that led to Raj and Meera’s estrangement, so they cook up ridiculous meet-cute type situations to get them to fall in love again. So you’ve got this really pleasing contrast between the young kids being silly and in love and the older people and all their baggage. Finally, Meera and Raj have a confrontation all shot in shades of blue full of as much chemistry as you could ever hope for, and it completely makes up for all the sins of this movie. Plus, Shahrukh has his manly JTHJ stubble, which makes up for even more.




This movie would not work at all with the shameless plagiarization from 90s movies. It even ends with the complete non-sequitur “bade bade deshon mein, aisi choti choti baatein” quote, just in case we hadn’t quite figured out that the entire draw of this movie is based on a movie that came out 20 years ago. But this is all to say that I really enjoyed the movie. It could have been better, the plot could have made more sense, but it had feelings and drama and lots and lots of punching people and that works out to be a good entertainer to me.

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