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Release
date:
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May 10, 2019
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Director:
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Punit Malhotra
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Cast:
Language:
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Tiger Shroff,
Tara Sutaria, Ananya Panday, Aditya Seal, Abhishek
Bajaj, Samir Soni, Manoj Pahwa, Gul Panag,
Guest appearances: Will Smith and Alia Bhatt
Hindi
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Can a leading man’s nice-guy
demeanour hold up an entire film? The answer is to be found in the new Tiger
Shroff-starrer in town. Shroff has a likeable quality about him, but his facial
muscles remain more or less stationary throughout Student of the Year 2, which I suppose could be deemed appropriate
considering that the plot itself has not moved since Sidharth Malhotra and
Varun Dhawan battled it out over a trophy and Alia Bhatt in Student of the Year (SOTY) in 2012.
That film was directed by Karan
Johar, and whatever its failings may have been – the foremost being that it
sinfully underutilised Bhatt’s acting talent and reduced her to a Barbie – at
least it had her cuteness, Malhotra’s hotness, Dhawan’s fledgling acting
skills, the trio’s undeniable charisma and a superficial fun factor going for
it. The sequel, produced by Johar and directed by Punit Malhotra (I Hate Love Storys), pretends to be
about two girls and a boy but it doesn't really care about the girls, and the
boy, well, he is played by Shroff who cannot act to save his life or a film.
SOTY is centred around the very very
middle class Rohan Sachdev (Shroff), star athlete of the low-brow Pishorilal
Chamandas College, and his rivalry with the very very wealthy Manav Singh
Randhawa (Aditya Seal) of the snooty Saint Teresa College not far away. When
Rohan beats Manav unexpectedly in a track event, the stage is set for a clash
in their personal and student lives culminating in the annual Dignity Cup
tournament between the colleges of Dehradun and Mussoorie that will also
decide the winner of the Student of the Year trophy.
You know women mean even less to SOTY 2 than they did to SOTY 1 when the bad guy promises the
good guy that at the end of the contest he will have the trophy on one arm and
the latter’s girlfriend on the other, and his attitude echoes the attitude of
the film itself, which treats their female collegemates as prizes to be won and
lost, nothing more. The irrelevance of the women is further underlined by the
fact that Student of the Year is a battle between eight colleges, of which we
know at least two to be co-ed, yet the competitions shown are all for boys
alone. The girls are not even in contention.
To analyse SOTY 2 primarily on the basis of its gender apathy would be to take
it too seriously though. What it ought to be judged on are its blandness,
triteness and poor casting. Cliché is piled on cliché in this unoriginal
screenplay.
The rich as the evil ones –
check.
The middle class as guileless,
largely good and at worst, misled by the rich – check.
Loneliness in an upper-class
family contrasted with warmth in middle-class family and community life –
check.
Glamorous, perfectly made up
girls in tiny clothes – check.
Enviably slim female waistlines
and legs perennially on display – check.
Boys with muscular, perfectly
sculpted bodies – check.
Male biceps and abs perennially
on display – check.
Boys who obligingly take off
their shirts for our benefit – check.
Boys and girls who look doll-like
in their physical flawlessness – check.
Soul – none .
Tara Sutaria who plays Rohan’s
girlfriend Mridula has a lukewarm personality, but Ananya Panday, who is cast
as mean girl Shreya, has an X factor that pushes its way past the layers of
gloss in SOTY2. Both characters are
initially positioned as significant but are in fact marginal to the
proceedings. The graceful and striking Ms Panday (actor Chunky Pandey’s
daughter) deserves more.
Aditya Seal acts better than
Shroff but has a somewhat dull screen presence, which made me wonder why his
role was not given instead to TV actor Abhishek Bajaj making his film debut
here as Rohan’s kabaddi teammate. In a tiny part, Bajaj makes a far greater impression
than Seal does as the second lead.
Even the choreography does not
throw up anything extraordinarily original. The usually cheery Vishal-Shekhar
too roll out a generic soundtrack that does not do much even for the remix of a
lovely old Hindi film song in an early dance-off.
There are certain plot elements
in SOTY 2 that could perhaps have borne fruit if
they had been explored by a better writer, such as the starting point of the
story which is about a boy making his girlfriend’s dreams his dreams and having
none of his own. This is a reversal of what we see in real-life man-woman
relationships, and who knows where it could have been taken. Here though, the
screenplay by Arshad Syed is so
preoccupied with foregrounding the men that the point wanders away before being
referenced once again briefly in the middle and the end, thus adding up to not
very much.
Class struggles among the youth
in educational institutions have great potential, as we know from Mansoor Khan’s
memorable Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar in
the early 1990s. SOTY 1 chose to
spend more time on its characters’ bodies, make-up and wardrobes, its
soundtrack and dance routines than on its writing, but proved to be
entertaining in its own limited fashion. SOTY
2 seems not to even try.
This lack of passion is mirrored
by Hollywood superstar Will Smith who dances unenthusiastically for a few
seconds on stage in this film in what must rank as the worst conceptualised,
worst shot superstar guest appearance in Bollywood in recent memory. Smith’s
scene competes with Sutaria’s insipidity, Shroff’s acting and numerous plot
clichés to be the answer to the question: what’s the worst part of Student of the Year 2?
Rating (out
of five stars): *1/2
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CBFC Rating (India):
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UA
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Running time:
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146 minutes
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This review has also been published on Firstpost:
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