Ginny Wedss Sunny 2

The screenplay is meandering, the editing slack and the direction often veers into juvenile territory. There are flashes of humour, mostly courtesy of Rohit Chaudhary as Sunny’s best friend but they are too few and far between to salvage the experience. Avinash Tiwary and Medha Shankr, both capable performers, do what they can with the material but even their sincerity cannot rescue a script that feels fundamentally out of step. One can’t help but wonder what drew them to a project so tonally confused and ideologically regressive. Ironically, the original Ginny Weds Sunny (2020), hardly a classic, now appears far more palatable in comparison. Perhaps the bigger question is whether Bollywood can move beyond this well-worn arranged marriage template. Because if this film is anything to go by, the genre isn’t just tired, it’s in desperate need of reinvention.

You can sense trouble when a film marketed as a comedy relies heavily on its background score to cue laughter. Instead of trusting its humour, Ginny Wedss Sunny 2 inserts exaggerated sound effects after almost every punchline, as if desperately reminding the audience that a joke has just been delivered. The bigger issue is that the humour itself rarely works. Much of it consists of characters talking over each other, indulging in weak puns or jokes (like comparing a man's privates to TV remotes), or resorting to physical antics like kicking and biting. The actors try their best, but the writing and editing leave them stranded, unable to generate genuine laughs.

And yet, there are fleeting stretches where the film is easy to watch, almost in spite of itself.

And that’s the thing, Ginny Wedss Sunny 2 has a lot to say, but it just doesn’t know what to do with it. It keeps adding one plot point after another, without any of them making sense. It also wraps everything in a very familiar Bollywood template: two strangers meet, get married, and are then expected to fall in love. The setup is cliched, the dialogues even more so, and the emotional stakes barely register. You don’t quite see when they fall in love, or why, which makes it hard to care whether they stay together. And that's quite blasphemous for a romantic film. Eventually, the film piles on its regressive tropes, all played for light laughs, hoping humour will smooth over the discomfort... but it doesn’t.

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’.

Prasshant Jha's story is weak, but it could have made for a decent entertainer. Prasshant Jha's screenplay fails to cover up the minus points of the story and also seems like a bhel puri of TANU WEDS MANU [2011], BADRINATH KI DULHANIA [2017], etc. Prasshant Jha's dialogues are okay. Some one-liners are regressive and might not be accepted by the modern audience. Prasshant Jha's direction is not worthy. To give credit where it's due, he has mounted the film in a commercial manner and shot it in the beautiful locales of Uttarakhand. A few scenes are lovely, like Ginny and Sunny meeting for the first time, Ginny marvelling that Sunny didn't ask her any awkward questions, Ram Sevak and Pintu calling Sunny at night, etc.