By Timothy Jairaj
Chaudhary Saheb (Prakash Raj), a violent Jat lord and a loving father, is on a mission to find his older daughter who eloped on her wedding night. He finds a photo of the absconding boyfriend and his friends, one of who is Bablu (Tiger Shroff). Bablu gets dragged into the search operation and falls madly in love with Dimpy (Kriti Sanon), Chaudhury’s younger daughter. (Don’t worry, she too tells him ‘I love you’ later on.)
Bablu is the knight in shining armour who gets magical strength in cheesy fight scenes, the Prince Charming who is present wherever Dimpy looks, the fairy godfather who has an answer to everything; he’s also a stubborn child who’d let his ass get whooped, mislead the father, help the elopers and “do all sorts of heropanti”, because he’s an unrealistic badass who loves Dimpy and loves the idea of rebellion.
As for the women in the film, there’s just one scene in the movie in which Dimpy and her close confidante, the cleaning girl, discover her runaway sister’s love letters and accidentally scatter them. In the heat of this moment, even if their exchange hardly amounts to a conversation, I thought the movie would pass the Bechdel test when Dimpy and the girl talk about getting rid of the letters lest someone discovers them – until all of a sudden, one of the letters flies out of the window and lands at her chachaji’s feet. And the men are back. There’s plenty of testosterone in the air and even in this scene, which begins with Dimpy stating that her father has stopped her from going to college, if men aren’t the subject of the girls’ conversation, they’re still present in the background.
This is another movie about the girl’s father and the girl’s boyfriend being at odds with each other. The father gets to know of their romance. There’s a fight scene between the boyfriend and the girl’s arranged lover (DDLJ, anyone?). Finally, there’s a mutual, rather macho threat-agreement between father and boyfriend about being responsible for the girl’s happiness, and Bablu and Dimpy get Chaudhury’s blessings. And my hopes succumbed to the fact that the movie is a man’s day out and the star cowboys are Prakash Raj and Tiger Shroff.
Timothy Jairaj is an intern at The Ladies Finger and a student at St. Joseph’s College of Arts & Sciences, Bangalore.