Cinemaah

Sleepless In Shanghai

The sequel to Happy Bhag Jayegi, a sleeper hit of 2016, also directed by Mudassar Aziz, has all the charms, as well as all the flaws of the original.

Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi  has to work out a very implausible excuse to have another Happy running around in China this time. In the earlier film, Harpreet Kaur (Diana Penty) had landed up in Pakistan by mistake, while trying to flee from her wedding to Daman Singh Bagga (Jimmy Sheirgill).  In this film, she visits China, accompanied by her husband Guddu (Ali Fazal), and is mistaken for another Harpeet Kaur (Sonakshi Sinha), a botany professor. In the real world the misunderstanding would not even have arisen—surely the university that invited her to teach would have her photograph; and if she wanted to teach in China, surely she would have learnt Mandarin.

Meanwhile, the second Happy is kidnapped by Chinese thugs, led by Chang (Jason Tham), who pick her up thinking she is the first Happy. In a very silly plot device, they need her to persuade a Pakistani politician (whom she met in the first film) to go ahead with a deal; sillier still, they also kidnap Bagga on the day of his wedding, and the Pakistani cop also returning from the earlier film, Usman Afridi (Piyush Mishra) on his retirement day, to convince Happy to do the job.

While Happy-1 enjoys her trip to Shanghai, and the university none the wiser about the switch, Happy-2 escapes from the gangsters, and instead of calling the university, embassy or cops, she wanders around till she runs into lonely embassy employee Khushwant (Jassi Gill), who is guilt-tripped into helping a fellow Punjabi. This Happy’s actual mission is to trace her fiancé (Aparshakti Khurana), who ditched her on her wedding day.

Along with the squabbling Bagga and Afridi, they cause mayhem in Shanghai. Never mind the contrived plot, and the mild racism (“all Chinese look alike”), the banter between these two gets the most laughs. Aziz also creates some really comic characters like the Pakistani-Chinese Adnan Chow (Denzil Smith--hilarious), trying to get the locals to appreciate Urdu poetry and biryani, and a fake Chinese called Fa Qu. Jason Tham is a riot as the inept Hindi-speaking goon.

Like its predecessor, this one too, goes on much after the gags have dries up-- a comedy should never let the audience get impatient for it to wrap up.

Sonakshi Sinha does her best, but is upstaged by the others, who have better roles and funnier scenes. Happy Phirr Bhag Jayegi is more enjoyable than the first and threatens to become a franchise. As Happy-2 says, “Every third house in Punjab has a girl called Harpreet Kaur.”

No Brain No Brawn

Nepotism in Bollywood is not confined only to star kids—there has been a succession of kids of producers and directors too; Utkarsh Sharma being the latest, carrying the heavy load of his father Anil Sharma’s expectations—a young man who is expected to do a Sunny Deol (Gadar was directed by Sharma), without having the muscle or screen presence.

Because Genius has been produced to introduce him, he is made to romance, dance, fight, rage, wave the national flag, and also twist and shout when his tinnitus (really!) gets unbearable.  Vasudev Shastri (Utkarsh Sharma) grew up in Mathura, so his greeting of choice is “Radhe Radhe”.  He tops the entrance exam for IIT, for which the runner up, Nandini (Ishita Chauhan) snubs his friendly (read stalkerish) overtures. But how can she not fall or a guy, who knows his science as well as his shastras? For a gift he gives her contact lenses and earrings with trackers, so that he can see and hear what she does!  Because he can also defeat international hackers and jam traffic signals, RAW hires him, and, when he is incapacitated in a shootout, also dismisses him.

Never mind, says Vasu, they can’t prevent him from fighting for his country, so he goes after the villain MSR (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), an ISI agent, who wants to plant bombs (what else!) and blow up temples in Mathura, because in the past a “kaalia” cop (Mithun Chakraborty) gave him grief for killing his parents. What else can Vasu do but stop him single-handed?

The writing is preposterous, and since both Vasu and MSR call themselves “genius”  (mostly pronounced gin-ee-yus by various characters)—the latter also calls himself “handsome”—you look for some brain or brawn in the film, and find both severely lacking.

How can Sharma explain why at interval point, the screen says, “Genius Begins” and at the end, “Genius Continues.”   Good heavens, surely they are not planning a sequel!