REVIEW 463: JOLLY LLB 2 (a.k.a. THE STATE VS JOLLY LLB 2)

Release date:	February 10, 2017
Director:	Subhash Kapoor
Cast: Language:	Akshay Kumar, Annu Kapoor, Saurabh Shukla, Kumud Mishra, Sayani Gupta, Manav Kaul, Rajiv Gupta, Inaamulhaq, Sunil Kumar Palwal, Ram Gopal Bajaj, V.M. Badola, Vinod Nagpal, Huma Qureshi Hindi

Director Subhash Kapoor’s Jolly LLB was one of the best Hindi films of 2013. It was that rare Bollywood venture that journeyed into an Indian courtroom with realistic storytelling rather than manufactured high-decibel dialoguebaazi, drawing humour and melodrama from true-to-life situations, through the medium of some of the industry’s finest actors led by the inimitable Arshad Warsi.

It goes without saying then that Kapoor has put his neck on the line with Jolly LLB 2, resurrecting a successful title and upping the stakes by casting a superstar as his protagonist. Three questions are crying out to be answered here: Is Part 2 as good as Part 1? Is Akshay Kumar as good as Warsi? Even when seen in isolation without the context of its predecessor, is this a good film? Patience, dear readers, patience!

Kapoor – who is credited with the story, screenplay, dialogues and direction of Jolly LLB 2 – sets the film in Lucknow where Jagdishwar Mishra a.k.a. Jolly (Akshay Kumar) works as an assistant to the veteran lawyer Rizvi (Ram Gopal Bajaj). A tragic incident prompts Jolly to set aside his casual dishonesty and metamorphose into a formidable legal activist. 

The case that has this transformative effect on him involves a pregnant widow seeking justice for her murdered husband, police corruption, judicial indifference, Kashmir politics and more. Individually, these are explosive ingredients. And significant portions of the film are credible as a result. It fails to come together in its entirety though because of the inconsistent writing. 

Keep in mind that the hero of the first Jolly LLB was initially ignorant, often unprepared, lazy and consequently amusing, but he was not a fool. The Jolly of this new tale is well-intentioned, but the weakness of his arguments, the glaring lacunae in the evidence he presents in court throughout (even after he has seemingly matured as a lawyer) and the loopholes in the demands made by the opposing counsel seem invisible not just to him but to the writer too.

Are polygraph tests admissible in a court of law? If a lawyer facilitates a prisoner’s escape, would it not strike him that presenting the escapee as a witness in a case could be problematic? These are just a couple of the questionable situations the film presents. There are more, which are dealt with in such a way that it is hard to figure out whether what guides Jolly’s actions and what prevents him from effectively citing the law in court is inexperience, ignorance or stupidity.

Making matters worse is Jolly LLB 2’s seeming indecision about the tone it wishes to strike: realistic or revved up. The many little touches that made Jolly LLB so enchanting, especially the detailing in the courtroom procedures and production design, are also not so evident here. It does not help that the first film’s one blaring shortcoming is carried forward into this one: songs are needlessly injected into the proceedings, the worst of them being a tuneless Holi number – Manj Musik’s Go pagal – that completely disrupts the mood of the narrative.

The gender equations in Jolly LLB 2 are worth a discussion. Without raising a clamour about it, the film gives us a hero whose wife (Huma Qureshi) has not taken his surname – she is Pushpa Pandey, not Pushpa Mishra. Without appearing overly self-conscious or comedifying the situation to soften the blow for viewers who may be disconcerted, it also shows him cooking for her and their child. And when her husband is assaulted, she – in a reminder of Rani from Queen – gives the attacker a fight to remember. (A bow here to action director Parvez Shaikh for the execution of that brief scene.)

Coming from a deeply patriarchal industry serving a largely patriarchal audience, these flashes amount to a noteworthy statement from Kapoor.

That statement would have meant a lot more though, if the film as a whole did not sideline women so completely. Pushpa Pandey herself is a marginal player in the central drama. The only female character of any importance to the plot is Hina Siddiqui (Sayani Gupta, wow!), whose personal calamity changes Jolly. A witness’ mother makes an impactless appearance. I wonder if it has struck the team of Jolly LLB 2 that everyone else with a name in their script – lawyers, relatives of lawyers, judges, witnesses – is a man.

Akshay Kumar deserves some praise here for not allowing his starry swagger to rear its head except in the song ‘n’ dance routines. His Jolly is not quite as charismatic as Warsi’s lawyer was in the first film, but he is interesting enough. This performance is not quite as good as what he achieved in last year’s Airlift, but it is engaging enough. Kapoor too must be commended for not allowing the storyline to be overwhelmed by such a major star’s presence.

The supporting cast is a parade of theatre stalwarts and seasoned character artistes from films. What a pleasure for stage enthusiasts to see Bajaj (a former head of the National School of Drama), V.M. Badola and Vinod Nagpal in the same big-screen production. What a pleasure too to see an actor from Jammu & Kashmir playing a cop from the J&K force, rather than an outsider to the state attempting an accent: Sunil Kumar Palwal has a striking presence and will hopefully be seen in more Hindi films in the coming years. (While on the subject of accents, watch Inaamulhaq playing a Kashmiri pronounce “card” differently within a span of a few seconds.)

My pick of the cast, as with Jolly LLB, is Saurabh Shukla playing the eccentric judge, Sunder Lal Tripathi, whose veneer of idiocy camouflages his don’t-mess-with-me attitude. That said, Shukla is not as memorable here as he was playing the same character in the previous film. The difference between him in 2013 and 2017 is a reminder that actors do not function in a vacuum in films: great performances are born of great acting extracted by great screenplays and great direction.

Jolly LLB 2, as it turns out, is a mixed bag. The references to the Kashmir conflict and Hindu-Muslim tensions are impressive because the film raises these crucial issues without being in your face about them. It also bravely takes a swipe at self-righteous deshbhakts in the ongoing nationalist-versus-anti-national debate. The basic elements in the story are teeming with potential. When it’s good, Jolly LLB 2 is alternately amusing and moving. Sadly, the patchy treatment leaves it sagging too often.

So yes, it pulls off humour and emotional resonance in several places, but those passages are also a reminder of what might have been if more time and thought had been invested in the writing of this film as a whole. Jolly LLB 2 has its moments, poignant, political and profound, but it ain’t no Jolly LLB.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	138 minutes 31 seconds

This article was also published on Firstpost:

http://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/bollywood/jolly-llb-2-review-akshay-kumar-subhash-kapoor-pull-off-emotional-resonance-in-a-patchy-film-3276406.html

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly_LLB_2

REVIEW 339: GUDDU RANGEELA

Release date:	July 3, 2015
Director:	Subhash Kapoor
Cast: Language:	Arshad Warsi, Amit Sadh, Aditi Rao Hydari, Ronit Roy, Rajeev Gupta, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Amit Sial, Brijendra Kala, Sree Swara Dubey, Achint Kaur    Hindi

Last week’s release Miss Tanakpur Haazir Ho struggled to tell a serious story through the medium of comedy. The director of that film would be well advised to watch Guddu Rangeela. This week’s big release is a satirical thriller and consequently a roller-coaster of sorts, swinging from laughter to tears to hope to laughter to heartbreak to seething rage and then back to laughter again, unobjectionable for the most part, and largely staying focused on its central theme: the stranglehold that khap panchayats have on rural societies and state-level politics in Haryana.

For that feat alone it is worth watching.

That’s not all. Among the other reasons that make Guddu Rangeela supremely watchable, there is Arshad Warsi, an actor so charming, so likeable and so natural before the camera that his mere presence on screen is worth the price of a ticket even for a bad film (which this one is not).

Arshad here plays a small-time singer whose stage shows are a front for his work as a small-time crook. Rangeela’s partner in crime is his much younger brother Guddu (Amit Sadh). Their bête noir is the local politician Billu Pehelwan (Ronit Roy). The three get embroiled in a kidnapping that involves a teacher called Baby (Aditi Rao Hydari), a goon called Gora Bangali (Dibyendu Bhattacharya) and the caretaker of a bungalow in Shimla (Brijendra Kala).

Director Subhash Kapoor is credited with Guddu Rangeela’s story, screenplay and dialogues. He has a smooth storytelling style. Satire is his MO as we already know from Phas Gaye Re Obama and Jolly LLB. And he has a feel for the real India, which was most evident in Jolly LLB’s small-town courtroom shorn of all the glamour, bombast and cliched posturing that mainstream Bollywood has lent to the Indian judiciary. There was no “dhaai kilo ka haath” in sight there; only fumbling lawyers, a judge who would not stop eating and Arshad’s warm smile.

If only Subhash had stuck to his strengths – humour and realism – Guddu Rangeela would have been a flawlessly smooth ride. Sadly, he occasionally dilutes the film’s impact with elements that don’t fit the overall tone. For instance, the two romantic songs thrust into the proceedings, one per woman in the lead cast as if that’s a mandatory requirement. I’m not campaigning here for a songless Bollywood, but for songs suited to the narrative, like the hilarious “mowdern” bhajan Maata ka email that Rangeela sings at the start and the delightfully kitschy title track.

The humour in Guddu Rangeela is harmless, with one exception. It is unlikely that if a woman in the film had been raped, we would have been given a scene featuring her friends laughing at her wounded vagina. Why then is it okay to make a joke about a man who has been similarly violated? I understand what the director was trying to do there – he was showing us friends trying to lighten the mood around a man in agony. It might have been a good idea to devote more thought to that situation though, considering that the real world too tends to react with amusement when confronted with the reality of sexual assault on men. That scene is a marked contrast to the inoffensive nature of the rest of the film about which the worst thing that can be said is that it ends with a sexist joke about ghosts and wives already publicised in a trailer.

It’s also hard to understand the compulsion to serve up a love story whenever a woman is  around. It’s as if a female presence must be justified with a romantic angle. The liaison between Guddu and Baby here is incongruous and contrived, since there’s little chemistry between them, they barely speak, they have nothing in common and nothing can explain the ‘relationship’ that blossoms apart from an assumption some people seem to make that when a physically attractive human male and female are in the same frame, lowwwe is inevitable. Fact: it is not.

Far more interesting is the chemistry between Arshad and Amit. Rangeela and Guddu are sweetly in sync and well-suited to the older man-younger man bonding at the heart of the story.

The two of them and other motifs scattered through the film are deliberately designed to be reminiscent of Jai and Veeru in Sholay. The motorbike with the sidecar, the background score and the long-drawn-out climactic aerial shot of the dustbowl that is the Haryana countryside – it’s both amusing and endearing to see the film maker’s ode to one of the greatest Indian gangster films ever made, considering the contrasting tenor of the two films.

A word here about Amit... No actually he merits a paragraph. In a journey that has included TV, the small part a journalist in Maximum (2011) and one of the leads in Kai Po Che (2013), this young actor has displayed potential worth watching out for. In the mildly crude, buffoonish Guddu, it is impossible to spot the sedate Omi from Kai Po Che. Here’s looking at you, kid!

The scene-stealer among the supporting cast is Rajeev Gupta who was so impactful in tiny roles in the Saheb Biwi aur Gangster films that it’s hard to understand why we don’t see more of him in Bollywood. Ditto for Sree Swara Dubey whose charisma was memorable in a brief appearance in D-Day (2013). She is noticeable here even in a fleeting role. He is a hoot as the corrupt cop Gulab Singh, delivering the world’s funniest Antakshari scene in partnership with Amit.

Aditi Rao Hydari is the only one who looks lost. Brijendra Kala delivers a pleasant change from the comical bit part player he has been in too many films. And Ronit Roy is suitably menacing.

For the most part then, Guddu Rangeela remains engaging because of the balancing act it achieves between its grim subject and its light touch. It also repeatedly throws up twists when you are not looking for any. This continues until the plot becomes a stretch towards the end, right from the point when a woman delivers a feminist sermon to a murderous panchayat – so believable, na? Then it turns out that Guddu and Rangeela’s seemingly  grand scheme to corner Billu Pehelwan had feet of clay. And oh yes, their accomplices turn up to support them in a shootout in the end, but we get no inkling of how they figured out where the two would be.

All complaints about Guddu Rangeela though are overshadowed by what’s worth recommending in it. Even when the film flounders, Arshad and Amit remain immensely watchable. Rangeela and Guddu never fail to elicit laughs or tug at the heart strings although, as the title track tells us, “Dono pakke ddheet hain / Aansu peete neat hain…” Such likeable rascals, those two!

Rating (out of five): **3/4

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	124 minutes

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guddu_Rangeela

176: JOLLY LLB

Release date:	March 15, 2013
Director:	Subhash Kapoor
Cast: Language:	Arshad Warsi, Boman Irani, Amrita Rao, Saurabh Shukla, Mohan Agashe, Mohan Kapoor, Vibha Chhibber, Sanjai Mishra, Manoj Pahwa, Harsh Chhaya, Ramesh Deo Hindi

Jolly LLB is no Munnabhai MBBS.

No seriously, it’s not! It’s surprising how many people have assumed that Jolly LLB is a Munnabhai wannabe, possibly because it contains a degree in the title, stars Munnabhai cast members Arshad Warsi and Boman Irani, and is directed by Subhash Kapoor who has bagged the next Munna project. Well, the commonalities end there. Jolly LLB is neither an out-and-out comedy like the two hugely successful Munnabhai films, nor does it have any pretensions to their scale and gloss. It’s the small, sweet, funny-yet-sad-and-moving, very believable story of struggling lawyer Jagdish Tyagi a.k.a. Jolly (Arshad Warsi) who shifts from Meerut to Delhi in search of greener pastures and greatness. In the Capital, Jolly meets hot-shot lawyer Rajpal (Boman Irani). When Jolly gets involved in the case of a millionaire drunk driver and some dead pavement dwellers, he is pitted against this Goliath of the legal community in one of the country’s most high-profile cases.

Courtroom dramas are rare in Bollywood and when legal proceedings do feature in Hindi films, they tend to be melodramatic and cliched, albeit in a wolf-whistle-worthy way. Jolly LLB is unusual for Bollywood because most of the action takes place in a court complex. And if you’ve ever been to Indian courts, you will agree that the District & Sessions Court in Jolly is far more credible than what we’re used to seeing in Hindi films. There is no speech-making here, except when the lawyers make their closing arguments. The formal language is missing, as is much of the infrastructure. Jolly can barely spell and is clearly not fully acquainted with all aspects of the law. Nor does he get to spout dialogues of the “tareekh pe tareekh” variety from Damini, designed to draw applause and cat calls. Yet when he does make his final address to the judge, it’s hard not to get teary-eyed because it all feels so darned real.

Much of this has to do with the writing and direction by Subhash Kapoor. Unlike his earlier film Phas Gaye Re Obama which petered out in the second half, Kapoor maintains a momentum throughout Jolly LLB. His characters, right down to the ones who barely get to speak, are interesting and memorable. The bigger point being made is about corruption in the Indian judiciary and police, but we’re also given a close look at the desolate conditions in which most lawyers function (in Jolly’s part of the world, even a chamber is a distant dream, and those who aspire to get there must secure their pathetic open-air ‘offices’ – table, chair, metal box – with lock and chain). The many asides in the court scenario in Jolly LLB are utterly, completely delightful (my favourite is the judge who sends off a love SMS just before a hearing begins). The humour is understated and effective (except in one scene where a constable auctions an SHO’s post, which starts out as rather amusing but then feels like it’s trying too hard, unlike the rest of the film). Kapoor is also not afraid to deliver to us a flawed hero whose initial motivation to take up the cause of the pavement dwellers is the potential media attention. What’s equally interesting is that it’s possible, just possible, that Jolly’s motivations remain unchanged even in the end though his methods change.

The always superb Arshad Warsi as Jolly switches between good, bad and gray, naïve and dogged with the consummate ease that only an actor of his calibre can achieve. Amrita Rao as his quietly firm and morally upright girlfriend Sandhya, and Boman Irani as the pompous, ruthless Rajpal are both equally remarkable in their roles. Other wonderful talents pop up to play cameos (including Marathi & Hindi veteran Ramesh Deo). But the highlight of the entire film is Saurabh Shukla’s Judge Tripathi … For too long has this actor been saddled with the same old gangster or cop roles where his physicality predominated his performances. Here in Jolly LLB he’s a slimy, smarmy chap yet it’s hard not to be drawn to this man of dubious integrity even when he farts and openly asks for a bribe and runs his courtroom like a personal fiefdom. Brilliant, Your Honour! Just brilliant!

There’s so much to praise in Jolly LLB that it feels bad to draw attention to the film’s failings which are, unfortunately, too major to be wished away. Warsi – wonderful actor though he is – seems to be playing a character about 20 years younger than his real-life age: can’t understand why some minor tweaking of the screenplay couldn’t have ironed out this problem. Ah well, this is such a common issue with Bollywood films that old habits could close our eyes to it. How, though, can we possibly pretend that we didn’t hear the film’s music? It’s bad enough that composer Krsna has churned out such mediocre melodies for Jolly LLB; what’s worse is that the songs pop up at the most inopportune moments, none more so than the David-versus-Goliath gung-ho number right at the end that almost kills the poignant mood the final courtroom scene leaves us with. If I’d been warned, I would have walked out the second the end credits started rolling. Still, Subhash Kapoor deserves to get off with a light sentence for those grouses … because in the overall analysis, Jolly LLB is a simple-though-layered, loveable film.

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

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	131 minutes

Photograph courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolly_LLB