Saturday, May 24, 2014
Heropanti
Fight, Dance, Repeat
When
Prakash Raj makes a drunken, tearful speech on fatherhood and collapses on a
bench, writhing with emotional agony, you make a mental note to check if Sabbir
Khan’s Heropanti is the remake of a
Tamil or Telugu film. Bingo, it is—Telugu film Parugu.
And with
this garbled plot in the hands of the director of Kambakht Ishq, Tiger Shroff makes his debut, after being groomed,
packaged and promoted as the next big thing.
He is good looking with muscled body, soft face, cheeky smile, but this
lame film was not the right launch for anyone, and certainly not for a guy who
wants to be a six-packed, parkour- trained action hero. He only gets to fight sideys, not even a
proper, shirt-ripping villain. When he
is not fighting, he is mooning over a girl he has just seen once—and no, she is
not that gorgeous.
Anyway, to
begin with the film establishes a “Jatland” where khaps rule, and the punishment for eloping with a lover, and
tarnishing the family’s honour is death.
The Chaudhary’s older daughter Renu (Sandeepa Dhar) runs away on her
wedding day. The Chaudhary’s several ferocious relatives and henchmen (who look
like they strolled over from an Anurag Kashyap film) have to find her, and they
pick up the boyfriend’s college buddies to thrash and question—which includes
Bablu (Tiger Shroff). This Bablu (seriously?) has no real name, and a vague
one-sentence backstory of chronic rebelliousness. He is, a ‘hero type’ and
every time someone accuses him of ‘heropanti’ he says, “Kya karoon, sabkl aati nahin, meri jaati nahin.” Nobody thought to change this giggle-worthy
dialogue, which means Tiger Shroff has nasty twitter posts and memes coming his
way.
Bablu and
his dumb buddies don’t escape because he has fallen in love with the
Chaudhary’s younger daughter Dimpy (Kriti Sanon—cast for her slim waist,
obviously); in the first half of the film, he has conversations with her “patli
kamar” seen through the bars of a basement window—never mind that when they
were pushed into a dark cell, it wasn’t underground. And plenty of dream
sequence songs, because Shroff Junior can dance too.
In the
second half the whole of Jatland goes to Delhi to search for Renu—along with
Bablu and Gang. Also, Dimpy can’t be left behind in case she runs away too, so
she has to be taken along. They move
from temple to court to guest houses (as if the eloping couple could not have
left town—the idiots, didn’t, that’s another issue). None of the boys thinks of walking off and
going home, if not informing the cops. Whoever heard of voluntary prisoners!
After
giving Dimpy lessons in standing up for herself and following her dream (to be
Miss Haryana, sigh!) Bablu listens to Chaudhary’s rants about izzat and why recalcitrant daughters
should be cut to pieces, and decides Dimpy should be left to her own fate—that
is to marry a particularly nasty guy from the Jat gang. If anybody is thinking DDLJ,
they are right. Tiger Shroff needs
another film to prove his talent—maybe he should pick up all the films Ranbir
Kapoor drops.
Labels: Cinemaah
