Despite having many elements and an ambitious plot, Aadu 3 ends up being an absolute letdown. Although crafted by Midhun Manuel Thomas himself, the creator of the franchise, the movie comes across as an amateurish fan-fiction, with the soul of the original completely missing. One of the major attractions of the first instalment was how unhinged the characters were. They could and would say anything, anywhere. They had zero filters and were too naive to understand the importance of thinking before speaking. Just as important was Pappan’s equation with each member of his gang. Unfortunately, those elements are totally missing in Aadu 3. Although Arakkal Abu (Saiju Kurup), Captain Cleetus (Dharmajan Bolgatty), Sasi Aashan (Indrans), and Sarbath Shameer (Vijay Babu), among others, are present in this instalment too, they seem to have lost their voice and soul.
But the writing offers us little depth, and that’s where this film, which had the potential to be a humdinger, falls flat. There’s so little passion between Sensharma and Rannta that you wonder what made them get together in the first place; what little we see is so chaste as to be non-existent. It takes an argument for both to break out; the supporting characters come off even worse, and the background music never quite stops tinkling away. Finally, it all comes down to that thing which is increasingly, and disappointingly, becoming a streaming bugbear: the idea is bravely out-of-the-box ; the underlined writing does it in.
Because of its desperate attempts to appear vibrant and cool, Athiradi compromises on the basics: emotions. While Arun and Paulson could have completely avoided it and made the movie a battle of male egos, the writers have also tried to anchor the narrative emotionally to give it more gravity. However, these moments and plot devices — even Sam’s brother’s recorded speech, which is actually pivotal to the narrative — fail to generate the desired impact and end up feeling quite dull. Even the conflict-building is unimpressive, preventing the rising stakes from truly resonating with the viewer. While the point of no return and the interval block are presented grandly, the build-up to them is shallow, thereby detracting from their overall impact. The lack of depth in the characters, including Sam and Kuttan, worsens the situation, particularly since they display excessive theatrics without meaningful justification for their behaviour. Worse still, the jokes just don’t land at all.
And I’m relieved to report that Border 2 holds on to the soul and spirit of the original, while giving us a much bigger canvas, showing conflict not just on land and air, but also water. It also brings back the biggest star of the original in Sunny Deol, introduced here as the ‘son of Dharmendra’ in the credits: he is far and away the biggest star of this one, towering over the rest of the ensemble, which includes Varun Dhawan, Diljit Dosanjh, Ahan Shetty (whose father Suniel had a major role in the original), and others. In the recreation of their domestic spheres, I’d say this one goes one better in giving us details of their home lives — the villages where the jawaans leave their families, waiting in dread and fear, holding on to hope that their men will return.
The execution is — there’s no other way to put itn — a drag. The reason, as always, is in the weak writing, and flat TV sitcom treatment, in which scenes are created with everyone lined up in the frame, waiting their turn to speak, before exiting: case in point, where the younger generation, Zs and Alphas, show their greedy, selfish millennial parents the error of their ways, and claim that Daadi, and her home, under attack by her own offspring, is where their hearts lie. It begins well enough, even if the likeable Kapil Sharma looks much too old to be a potential life-partner of Khateeb’s character: hard to swallow that they were in college together, and are circling back to each other nearly a decade later; easier to believe that she isn’t too happy with the match, having set her eyes on a career and a life abroad.
Finally, it is Ranveer Singh who keeps us looking, all through the plodding first half, and in the slightly-more speeded up post-interval section, with his light-eyed gaze turning steely and soft by turns, keeping the flag waving. The pain of Jaskirat — his backstory is tightly told — is transmuted into the fire that keeps Hamza burning, and Ranveer makes a handy meal of both sides of the coin, luxe locks firmly in place. I have to say that torture doesn’t suit him; Vicky Kaushal did a better job of being strung up and savaged in Chhava. But an unexpectedly moving coda makes up the finale, leaving the door open for more adventures.
But the rest of it is a drag. Good actors are arrayed across dining tables and ghar ka aangans delivering the usual dialogue about shaadi, ladka, ladki, sambandh: imagine a fine ensemble — which includes Joy Sengupta, Ayesha Raza Mishra, Mona Ambegaonkar and Ila Arun– getting stuck in a rut like this.
Ginny Wedss Sunny 2 is exactly the kind of rom-com that Bollywood is constrained to doing these days, in an era swinging wildly between minority drubbing and bhajan clubbing: empty of fresh ideas, trying to please the conservatives and the so-called moderns, going exactly nowhere. High-school dropout Shivansh aka Sunny (Avinash Tiwary) is a kushti-loving fellow who is careful to wear a langot which looks more like a pair of shorts. His big ambition is to wrestle at the national level, but a wrong video going viral puts paid to that plan, leaving him unhappy and unfulfilled in his Rishikesh house, which he shares with his father (Sudhir Pandey), and older brother and bhabhi, and a tenant who doubles up as the ‘hero ka BFF’.
It says something about the utterly generic Kartavya, a crime thriller set in Haryana, that the good guy, played by Saif Ali Khan is surrounded by a bunch of bad guys — a senior cop (Manish Chaduhuri) who keeps blocking Pawan’s (Saif Ali Khan) path, and a junior cop (Sanjay Mishra) who is a constant companion, basically playing the BFF trope, and not one of them has been given a characteristic that we haven’t seen before. The streaming rule 101 — Let There Be A Body Within A Few Minutes Of The Opening — is faithfully ticked off. The victim is a faceless woman, later identified as a journalist, taking refuge in this town, for no good reason that we are given.
This had the potential to be a cracker Manohar Kahaniya bhaabhi-gar-par-hain-style comedy, its darker edges being used to show men their place. And who better than Madhuri, whose fine comic bone Hindi cinema has never exploited fully, to front a spicy, pulpy flick which could have revealed the real choli-ke-peecche woman, fully and completely herself. But it takes almost till the last quarter for the actual film to kick in, during which Dimri gets a breakout scene in which she dresses down her useless spouse (Bhardwaj is a hoot). Dharna shows just how talented she is in the brief flashes she gets, but, like the rest of the cast, is wasted in playing a type rather than a character. Someone will make a film that will give Madhuri, ripe for a role in which she can play to her strengths, her due. Sadly, Maa Behen is not that film.
But Mana Shankara Vara Prasad Garu doesn’t take long to grow complacent, and that trait always remains unwelcome in the comedy genre. The humour in the setup portion works just fine, though the expectation is that the story is only going to become more exciting and make the laughs feel as organic as possible. We do get a turn in the plot on cue, which involves Shankara’s two estranged young children. Ravipudi makes this the emotional hook and lends it a Main Hoon Na kind of design that requires the father (and his subordinates) to move briefly to a boarding school and win over the kids. In conception, this is exciting for several reasons: the story isn’t just relocated to a new terrain, but set up to grow complicated in intriguing, often comical ways.
But some of the unease she generates is blunted by the tacked-on rigmarole about deadly illnesses, viruses, human guinea pigs and greedy medical corporations. No other character is allowed to be bigger than Roy– understandable as she is the hero of this Yash Raj-produced enterprise–which is both a good thing and a bad thing. Mukerji is a solid actor, and we go along with her as she leads from the front, with everyone else following in her rear. But even she can’t do much with the degree of over-writing and predictable plot-points: when a character says aap rath chalao, aur mujhe saarthi banne do, or words to that effect, we know exactly where this is going, just as we do when too-good-to-be-true characters crop up.
