Grail quest.

Jackpot (2019) is a caper movie, with a gang of charming but perhaps morally shady misfits stumblimg into crazy situations while chasing after a MacGuffin which can change all of their lives.  In Indian movies, the MacGuffin is usually a bag of diamonds, but in Jackpot the object of desire is a magical pot with the power to multiply anything placed within it.  So, you know, not really going for gritty realism here.

Our misfits in chief are Akshaya (Jyotika) and Masha (Revathy), small time con artists who steal from the middle class and give to . . . themselves, mostly, but they both have the requisite heart of gold and will help the less fortunate when needed.  They are an effective partnership, but Masha is clearly the quick-witted sidekick, while Akshaya is the swaggering hero who can con with the best of them but also beat up a room full of thugs when needed.

The titular jackpot is buried in the estate of Maanasthan (Anandaraj).  Maanasthan likes to think of himself as a crime lord, but he's really just a big bully who employs a gang of dim-witted henchmen and lives in fear of his police inspector sister Maanasthi (also played by Anandaraj, and it's exactly as funny as it sounds, i.e. not very).  Maanasthan has no idea that the pot even exists, let alone is buried on his estate, so he has no idea why these two crazy women keep messing with him.

And then there's Ragul (Vinu Krithik), a handsome young man who dreams of a career in the movies.  One night Ragul insults the wrong soothsayer and is magically transformed into a giant insectthe decidedly less handsome Yogi Babu.  In his new form, Ragul has no identification and even his parents don't believe he is who he says he is, so after his own set of misadventures, he's left hungry and wandering the streets until he manages to stumble on to the main plot.

When discussing South Indian films, you'll sometimes come across the terms "mass" and "class."  A class film is a movie with serious artistic intent, a movie which focuses on a specific topic and is often aimed at a specific audience.  A mass film, on the other hand, focuses on entertainment, and will usually include over the top action scenes, broad comedy, catchy songs and big dance numbers.  Mass heroes tend to be swaggering badasses who can back up their swagger with physics-defying stunts when needed.  Jackpot is trying very hard to be a mass film.

The big difference is Jyotika.  She's been in mass movies before (including one which is actually called Mass) but as the love interest, not as the hero.  Here, she's the hero, and her job is to be awesome.  She's awesome.  It's not a subtle performance, but it is a very entertaining one.

Imagine suddenly discovering that Farida Jalal is your grandmother.

Saif Ali Khan is one of Bollywood's most talented and versatile actors . . . now.  But before his complex and nuanced performances in movies like Omkara and Being Cyrus, Khan rose to prominence with a string of perfectly adequate performances in movies like Yeh Dillagi and Dil Tera Diwana.  Like a lot of Bollywood actors of the era, Khan had a consistent persona; his characters tended to be charming ladies' men who are more than a little self-absorbed, at least until they are transformed by the love of a good woman.  All of which brings me to Jawaani Jaaneman (2020), in which Khan plays a charming ladies' man who is more than a little self-absorbed, but this time, he's middle aged!

Khan plays Jaswinder "Jazz" Singh, a London real estate broker who is living his dream life: a few hours a day working with his long suffering brother Dimpy (Kumud Mishra) as they chase the deal of a lifetime, long nights in the night club owned by his friend Rocky (Chunky Pandey), and the occasional Sunday dinner with his parents.  When his mother (Faida Jalal) asks him when he's going to settle down and start a family of his own, Jazz always insists that he's happy being free, and he seems to really mean it.

And then she walks into the night club, and into his life.  She is Tia (the splendidly named Alaya Furniturewala), a bright, beautiful young woman from Amsterdam who is looking for the man who might be her father.  After a bit of cajoling, Jazz agrees to a DNA test, and the pair discover that a) Jazz is indeed Tia's father, and b) Tia is pregnant, meaning that Jazz has gone from zero to grandpa in the space of a day.  Before long, Tia has moved in to Jazz's bachelor pad, and a reluctant Jazz has started to discover that adulting isn't so bad after all.

And that's basically the movie.  Oh, there are subplots, as Jazz pursues the aforementioned deal of a lifetime and nearly stumbles into a grown-up relationship with his hairdresser and sassy platonic gal pal Rhea (Kubbra Sait), and there are complications, most notably the arrival of Tia's hapless ex-boyfriend Rohan (Dante Alexander) and her aggressively laid-back hippie mother Ananya (Tabu), but at heart it's a very simple story about a charming but self-absorbed ladies' man who is transformed by the love of his long lost daughter.  Saif Ali is playing basically the same character he used to play twenty five years ago, but now he's doing it with an extra quarter century's worth of acting skills, and it makes a difference.  The entire cast is great, particularly Tabu, who combines New Age enlightenment with self-centered condescension, putting the aggressive in passive aggressiveness.  Still, while Ananya is usually terrible in an entertaining fashion, she's also involved in the film's one sour note, propositioning a clearly reluctant Jazz in a scene which promptly cuts to black.  It's played for laughs, but if the genders had been flipped I don't think anyone would have found it funny.

Apart from that bit of unpleasantness, Jawaani Jaaneman is a charming and sweet love story about a different kind of love.  I recommend almost all of the movie.

Blame it on the wind

I have to give Pokkiri Raja (2016) credit for daring, if nothing else.  Making a movie about yawning is risky, because yawns are famously contagious, and you really don't want the audience yawning their way through your action comedy.

Mild-mannered computer programmer Sanjeev (Jiiva) has a powerful and powerfully infectious yawn, capable of putting an entire office to sleep.  Because of his terrible yawn, he loses his job and his girlfriend on the same day.  Fortunately he gets a new job, thanks to his friend Mojo (Yogi Babu), and meets a new girl, Sunitha (Hansaki Motwani).  Because of a series of ridiculous coincidences, Sanjeev is convinced that Sunitha is an alcoholic, but she's actually an enthusiastic social activist dedicated to literally cleaning up the streets, most notably by riding around the city on a water truck and spraying men who are urinating in public.

Ranjeev is eventually convinced to take a turn atop the water truck.  Unfortunately, the first person he sprays is "Cooling Glass" Guna (Sibiraj), a vicious gangster who just finished murdering a woman.  Guna is publicly humiliated and arrested, and he vows to track down the guy on the water truck and make him pay.  Fortunately(?) by the time he gets out of jail, Sanjeev's yawn has evolved; it now produces a tremendous wind which shatters Guna's trademark sunglasses, blinding him.  With Guna temporarily out of the way, Sanjeev has time to pursue a romance with Sunitha and explore the nature of his powers.

And once again I am making the movie sound more coherent than it actually is.  There is a plot, and it more or less hangs together, but the plot is only there as a delivery vehicle for goofy fight scenes, dodgy special effects, and incredibly broad physical comedy.  The film fully commits to its goofy premise, but that doesn't make it any less goofy, so the end result is a goofy movie.

Villiputs & Vedhalam

Like the Baahubali films, Puli (2015) is a mytho-historical epic set in a fantastic version of India's past, in which a young man who was found in a river as a baby goes on a quest and discovers his true heritage.  Puli is definitely not a Baahubali ripoff, though; leaving aside the fact that the movie came out only a few months after Baahubali: The Beginning, human culture is full of mystery babies pulled from rivers.  The important thing is what happens next, and Puli definitely goes in its own direction.

Before we get to the baby, though, let's talk about the world.  In this particular mythic age, much of India has been conquered by the vedhalam, a race of blue-eyed demons from far to the west.  Rather than hang out in trees and ask kings questions about morality, though, these particular vedhalam do evil overlord stuff, terrifying villagers, demanding exorbitant taxes, and dragging the occasional unfortunate off to be sacrificed.  The vedhalam are beautiful and terrible and too powerful for mortal men to fight, like a cross between rakshasa and Tolkien's elves, with superpowers lifted pretty directly from wuxia movies.

And then Vembunathan (Prqadhu) finds a baby in the river.  Well, a baby and an egg.  The baby grows up to be Marudheeran (Jospeh Vijay), who is naturally charming, fearless, and a skilled martial artist, while the egg hatches into Sooran (Karunas), a magical talking bird who isn't nearly as annoying as I feared.  Marudheeran is determined to keep his village safe from the unstoppable demon-tyrants, even if that means he has to grovel to do it.  He's also determined to win the heart of Pavazhamalli (Shruti Haasan), a childhood friend who has just returned to the village.

Marudheeran does manage to woo Pavazhamalli, and they are secretly married, but while he is away from the village attending to some family rituals, the vedhelam attack, murder Vembunathan, and kidnap Pavazhamalli.  Because she was born under a full moon, she's a perfect human sacrifice, so Marudheen must rescue her from the fortress of the vedhalam queen Yavanna (Sridevi!) and her general Jalatharangan (Sudeep.)  It's true that no human can stand up to the vedhalam, but the village priest happens to have been working on a magical potion which can give a human the strength and wire-fu powers of a vedhalam, but only for eight minutes.

Just as Baahubali draws heavily from the Mahabharata, Puli pulls from the Ramayana, with Asterix as Ram and a bird as Laxman.  That's just the basic plot, though; Puli's influences are . . . eclectic.  Rather than monkeys, Marudheeran befriends the villiputs, who are, as the name implies basically Lilliputians, and possibly also the brownies from Willow.  The villiput princess Einstein (Vidyullekha Raman) joins him on the quest and they seek the counsel of the turtle from The Neverending Story.  Marudheeran gets in a fight with a panther.  He meets a cyclops. And it only gets stranger from there.

But while the worldbuilding is a glorious mess, the actual plot is a fairly straightforward quest narrative.  The real fun comes from the performances.  Sridevi in particular is delightful.  She creates an evil queen who is one part Galadriel, one part Wicked Witch of the West, chewing the scenery with style and elegance, whether she's presiding over a sinister dinner party or running up the wall during a swordfight.

I suspect that Puli is actually a bad movie, but if so it's a bad movie that I really enjoyed.