REVIEW 768: LOVE AAJ KAL (2020)

Release date:	February 14, 2020
Director:	Imtiaz Ali
Cast:	Sara Ali Khan, Kartik Aaryan, Randeep Hooda, Arushi Sharma, Simone Singh, Siddharth Kak
Language:	Hindi

Great film romances have the power to make a cynical viewer believe and become so invested in the characters on screen as to yearn for their union. Imtiaz Ali’s Love Aaj Kal redux had the opposite effect on me: it drove me to turn my back on my Gandhian principles and long to smack its ensemble of leads – Zoe, Veer, Raghu and Leena – across the face, then yank them off screen, thus to end the agony of watching this mind-numbing film.

Imtiaz Ali must be suffering a peculiar bankruptcy of ideas that he chose to remake his own 2009 hit Love Aaj Kal with nothing worthwhile to add to what he said 11 years back. That one – the story of differing journeys to the same emotion in the past and present told in parallel – had the collective charisma of Saif Ali Khan, Deepika Padukone and Rishi Kapoor, a cute newcomer called Giselle Monteiro, a narrative structure unusual for Bollywood, the charm of the old-world Khan-Monteiro saga and a darling finale surprise going for it. It was not earth-shatteringly great cinema, but it was nice.

This Love Aaj Kal is what is known as a “spiritual successor” or “spiritual sequel”, except that it is so godawfully boring, contrived and wannabe that it provoked some very unspiritual, unholy feelings in me. Drowning as it is in stereotypes of millennial women and youth at large, Kartik Aaryan’s awkwardness, some surprisingly hammy acting by the usually solid Randeep Hooda and tedium, the new film tragically marks a further decline in the qualitative graph of a writer-director who debuted with the sweet Socha Na Tha in 2005, crackled and popped with the Kareena Kapoor-starrer Jab We Met (2007) and has only shone intermittently since.

Before we get to know Leena (Arushi Sharma) and Zoe (Sara Ali Khan) of Love Aaj Kal 2020, we see them yelling at two men played by Kartik Aaryan. That in itself is a warning bell: Aaryan barely has the skill to pull off even one character who does not look and sound entirely like Aaryan, so imagine the error of stretching him to play two men within the same film. Leena is screaming at Raghu (Aaryan) for stalking her, then she screams at him some more for promising to stop. “Did I tell you to stop?” she hollers. That is the second warning bell: here comes yet another Hindi film peddling the dangerous trope that women intentionally send men confusing signals, that a woman’s “no” usually means “yes” or “maybe”.

As the film progresses, in the present day in the National Capital Region we meet Zoe and Veer (Aaryan). She appears to be Ali’s notion of what a millennial city-dwelling Indian female human is: she wears chhote-chhote shorts, wants men for sex but not love, says the word “career” a zillion times and uses “whatever” as an exclamation point. All these characteristics serve as superficial markers and nothing else. Veer pursues her with a loyal doggy expression on his face, and we are given to understand that he wants more than sex from her.

As Zoe begins to fall for him, she turns to an older man played by Hooda for advice and is dragged into flashbacks to his 1980s-90s romance with Leena in Udaipur and Delhi. You see, Hooda is the older version of Raghu who we first saw in his younger days played by Aaryan. Same guy who was being rebuked by Leena for stalking her and then further rebuked for agreeing not to do so. Confused? Just you wait, Henry Higgins, Love Aaj Kal has only begun.

In the Leena-Raghu plot from kal (yesterday), she may send mixed messages to him at first, but she has absolute clarity in her mind about what she wants. He does not. In the aaj (today) of the narrative, Zoe is muddled in the head, and views her professional dreams and personal feelings as mutually exclusive although Veer has at no point pressured her to choose between the two. The paavam fellow, on the other hand, is smitten and stricken and completely committed to her, but aiyyo she chews up his brain with her indecisiveness, while she and the older Raghu chew up our souls with all their philosophical mumbo-jumbo about pyaar, the burden placed on us by the mistakes of earlier generations, fidelity, human instincts and so on.

Gawd, how much do Zoe and Veer talk. They talk and they talk and they talk, and they go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth in their messed-up, mixed-up minds, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until I wanted to beg them to hook up.

Ms Khan has pizzazz and gives it her best shot, but even her striking screen presence cannot redeem this film. Mr Aaryan, on the other hand, is even worse than this script. Perhaps realising his acting limitations late in the day, at one point Ali gives Raghu a beard planted very carefully and precisely on the rim of his jaw and prosthetics to chubby up his face, hence distinguishing him from the scruffy, thin-looking Veer.

Post-interval, a stand-up comedian pops up to pontificate about how monogamous relationships have been imposed by society on men, who are naturally wired to wander and to keep their youknowwhats hanging out instead of confining them to their pants. Ah okay, so this is the point the film wishes to make? But wait, no, is it not Veer who is singularly focused on Zoe while SHE is shopping around? Whatever.

Love Aaj Kal is pretentious, verbose and thoroughly insufferable. Among its many contrivances is the use of Hooda’s voice playing in the background as the end credits roll, whispering sentences that are perhaps meant to be wise and impressive. I managed to catch the very last line as the very last word disappeared from the screen. “Romantic hai na kahaani?” I think I heard him ask. (The story is romantic, is it not?) The answer – if you have any doubts after reading this review so far – is an absolute, vehement, resounding no. That truth hurts though, because once upon a time jab Imtiaz Ali and Kareena Kapoor met, they did create screen magic.

Rating (out of 5 stars): 0.01

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	141 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/love-aaj-kal-movie-review-sara-ali-khan-is-saddled-with-kartik-aaryan-and-imtiaz-alis-mind-numbing-script-8040601.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Aaj_Kal_(2020_film)

REVIEW 583: BAAGHI 2

Release date:	March 30, 2018
Director:	Ahmed Khan
Cast: Language:	Tiger Shroff, Disha Patani, Manoj Bajpayee, Randeep Hooda, Prateik Babbar, Darshan Kumar, Deepak Dobriyal, Grandmaster Shifuji Shaurya Bhardwaj, Vipin Sharma, Barbie Sharma, Cameo: Jacqueline Fernandez Hindi

“One man army… Against all… Kick… Punch… Fly… Repeat” – these words flash on screen during the trailer of Baaghi 2.

“Kick… Punch… Fly… Repeat” was the formula that turned Baaghi Part 1 into the blockbuster it became for actor Tiger Shroff in 2016. Part 2 regurgitates the nuts and bolts of the template, retains Shroff in the cast and adds all-pleasing clichés into the mix.

A bow to the ongoing chest-thumping nationalist discourse in India – check.

Stylised action centred around Shroff – check.

Extreme violence – check.

Romance with pretty girl to soften the blows – check.

Pretty girl soaking in the rain to establish her vivacity a la Shraddha Kapoor in too many of her films – check.

Heroine accusing hero of chasing her though he is not, in deference to male audience members who feel that is precisely what all women do – check.

Heroine saying “I hate stalkers”, I suppose in deference to feminists in the audience put off by the aforementioned scene – check.

Heroine pretending to be irritated with hero though she is not – check.

Songs to lighten the mood when the going gets intense – check.

Villain dancing in darkened den with ‘item’ girl – check.

Excuses in the plot that allow Shroff to take off his shirt and display an impeccably muscled, painted-up torso – check.

Hero’s shirt ripped off in the final fight – check.

There are moments in Baaghi 2 that are so trite and so dated, it feels like a 1970s-’80s assembly-line product. The shirt-stripping, of course, is a 21^st century Bollywood trope that was fun when it started but is now becoming tedious in the hands of unimaginative directors.

And Baaghi 2 is nothing if not unimaginative and bland.

The film opens with an attack on Neha (Disha Patani) by two masked men while she is seated in her car. For the record, Patani here looks uncannily like Shraddha Kapoor who played the joint protagonist of the previous Baaghi.

Cut to two months later, and we meet Ranveer Pratap Singh a.k.a. Ronnie (Shroff), an Army man stationed in snow-laden, mountainous territory. Ronnie is introduced as an upright, no-nonsense fellow who tied a civilian to a jeep and paraded him around the area as retribution for stone throwing and disrespect to the national flag.

The reference is obviously to the real-life Major Leetul Gogoi who, last year, used an innocent civilian, Farooq Ahmad Dar, as a human shield tied to his jeep while he drove through several Kashmiri villages. The state human rights commission declared Gogoi’s act illegal, and there is no evidence till date that Dar was guilty of any crime that day, but the team of Baaghi 2 clearly does not care for facts since pandering to majoritarian sentiments has yielded box-office results for other Bollywood films in recent years.

The weird part is that this intro is just an aside in a film that is primarily about Ronnie’s link to Neha. We soon learn they were in love in college, and that four years earlier, she had broken off their relationship to marry a man of her father’s choice.

In the present, the Goa-based Neha seeks Ronnie out in desperation when her four-year-old daughter is kidnapped. Ronnie takes leave from work to help her, but is soon flummoxed when everyone around her, including her husband Shekhar Salgaonkar (Darshan Kumar), insists that she does/did not have a child.

The pre-interval portion of Baaghi 2 remains suspenseful as we grapple with the mystery of the missing girl. Unless you have already seen the 2016 Telugu film on which it is based – Kshanam directed by Ravikanth Perepu, starring Adivi Sesh and Adah Sharma – there are questions that hold attention for a while. Is Neha mentally disturbed? Does little Rhea exist?

The addition of a string of promising supporting characters revs up the proceedings. There is the cynical DIG Ajay Shergil (Manoj Bajpayee), the eccentric ACP Loha Singh Dhull a.k.a. LSD (Randeep Hooda), Neha’s drugged-out brother-in-law Sunny Salgaonkar (Prateik Babbar) and the well-meaning car dealer Usman Langda (Deepak Dobriyal). They offer hope especially since Bajpayee, Hooda and Dobriyal are vastly superior artistes to the gym-manufactured leading man.

Soon though it becomes evident that director Ahmed Khan and his writers (story adaptation: Sajid Nadiadwala, also the film’s producer; screenplay: Jojo Khan, Abbas Heirapurwala and Neeraj Kumar Mishra) have bitten off more than they can chew.

The action becomes almost robotic post-interval, the narrative cold, and the effort at clever dialogue writing is laughable as the film drones on.

The stunts that start off as worthy of wolf whistles lose their lustre soon enough. There is only so much that style can achieve when substance is absent. Santhana Krishnan Ravichandran’s camerawork is completely uninspired even as the film travels through beautiful locations.

Randeep Hooda’s conviction in the midst of such dullness is enjoyable for a while. He throws himself into the role of a sartorially unconventional cop – posted in Goa from Punjab – who is not above being impertinent with his seniors. He even manages to pull off lines like, “Jaise udte Punjab ko main zameen pe le aaya, waise doobte Goa ko kinaare pe le aaoonga.”

His charisma can do little for Baaghi 2 by its second half though, when scene after scene is rolled out so lifelessly that even the usually fantastic Deepak Dobriyal ends up sounding unwittingly comical when he says, with reference to himself, in a particular tragic moment, “Hyderabad is not known just for biryani, it is also known for qurbani (sacrifice).” Tee hee. That sentence, by the way, is the writers’ transparent effort to offer up a ‘good Muslim’ in the script to counter the initial pandering to Islamophobia and anti-Kashmiri-Muslim sentiment in the opening scenes.

Ronnie in Baaghi 2 is meant to be some sort of profound metaphor for the Army and the battle of nationalist versus anti-national forces. I realised this in the closing moments, after the secret of Rhea’s disappearance is revealed to be a damp squib and the villains have been vanquished in this seemingly personal enmity, when Ronnie’s army boss pops up to bellow the words, “The war is over. The war is over.” More unintentional hilarity, I say.

The much-discussed Ek Do Teen redux is the least of Baaghi 2’s problems. The music and Jacqueline Fernandez’s dancing do not deserve the condemnation they have received in response to the song video released earlier, but the overall effect is unexceptional enough in comparison with the original featuring Madhuri Dixit to make you wonder why they bothered to redo it.

At the heart of this film’s tribulations lies Tiger Shroff. The young star’s nice-guy vibe and labours at the gym are unmistakable, but can do little to make up for his blank face. Given that, and the fact that the stunt choreography has nothing new to offer (unlike the inventive use of Kalaripayattu in Baaghi), Baaghi 2 is an all-out insipid affair.

Tiger Shroff is just one of many passionless ingredients in this passionless film.

Cautionary note: Baaghi 2 is a great showcase for the inconsistent track record of India’s Central Board of Film Certification. Limbs and necks are broken with gay abandon throughout and at one point the camera focuses on DIG Shergil poking a finger into a fresh bullet wound on Ronnie’s body. Yet this film has been awarded a mild UA rating while others are routinely banned, chopped and/or given A certificates merely as punishment for being realistic.

Rating (out of five stars): *1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	144 minutes 46 seconds

A version of this review was published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/baaghi-2-movie-review-tiger-shroff-pounds-his-way-through-a-marginally-suspenseful-largely-robotic-film-4412261.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baaghi_2