2005's Bunty Aur Babli is one of my favorite movies; it's a giddy romp about a pair of golden-hearted con artists, a movie beautifully painted in shades of pink, driven by a gorgeous soundtrack and a series of ferocious dance numbers, and given life through the chemistry shared by Abhishek Bachchan and rani Mukherjee. Naturally, I was intrigued by the trailer for Bunty Aur Babli 2 (2021), which shows the original pair leaving their retirement in order to track down a new pair of scammers who have assumed the Bunty aur Babli identities. It's a fantastic premise for a sequel, but of course everything depends on the execution.
Vimmi (Rani Mukherji, as she spells her name now) and Rakesh (Saif Ali Khan, replacing Abhishek Bachchan) are law-abiding citizens leading a comfortable, if boring, small town life. Rakesh is a ticket collector for the railway, while Vimmi is a housewife and devoted mother to their spoiled son Pappu (Agrim Mittal). Looking at them, nobody would suspect that they were once the infamous Bunty and Babli, a pair of con artists who trekked across India scamming the rich and giving to the poor.
And then Bunty and Babli are back in the news, scamming a group of sleazy businessmen and leaving behind their famous calling card. Police inspector Jatayu Singh (Pankaj Tripathi) knows Rakesh and Vimmi's secret, so he arrests the pair, but while they are in jail Bunyu and Babli strike again. Jatayu realizes that they are dealing with a new Bunty and Babli, so he blackmails Vimmi and Rakesh into helping him capture them, though he's secretly planning to arrest all four Buntys and Bablis when he gets the chance.
Vimmi in particular is eager to protect the brand, so she and Rakesh get to work. And while the movie wants us to think that they're out of shape has-beens, they actually catch Kunal (Siddhant Chaturvedi) and Sonia (Sharvari Wagh), the new Bunty and Babli, in short order. However, there isn't a lot of evidence and so Sonia and Kunal browbeat Jatayu into letting them go. Rakesh and Vimmi figure out the next target and craft a plan to catch the new pair in the act, but Jatayu sidelines them at the last minute, and Sonia and Kunal get away with billions of rupees.
Jatayu throws them off the case, despite the fact that he's the one who failed. But now it's personal, and Rakesh and Vimmi decide to stop trying to act like the police, and instead tackle the problem as Bunty and Babli. Cue training montage.
As good as the premise is, the actual movie is . . . flawed. Part of the problem is that while the new Bunty and Babli are reasonably attractive and charming, we're not really given much reason to care about them. In the original movie, Rakesh and Vimmi sang a whole song about their frustrated hopes and dreams before they even met. We saw them try to do things the right way before drifting into scamming people, and we saw their relationship slowly develop. Kunal and Sonia, on the other hand, arrive as a couple, already con artists, and we don't get much insight into their motivations until the every end of the movie, apart from the fact that Sonia is trying to raise money in order to launch an app she developed.
On the other hand, in the first movie, Vimmi and Rakesh were fun. They spend much of the sequel as bickering, frustrated sad-sacks, even when they are doing much better police work than the actual police, and it takes far too long for them to get their groove back. Some big dance numbers would help with the energy level, but there aren't any, at least until the closing credits. We get jokes, but a lot of them fall flat.
Which is not to say that the movie is completely terrible. The scams are fun. Rani Mukherji always has charm to spare, and I appreciate that Saif Ali Khan has embraced playing a middle aged guy lately. But it's missing the drive and the heart of the original. Bunty Aur Babli managed to capture lightning in a bottle, but the sequel is just trying to sell us the bottle. Don't get me wrong, it's an okay bottle, but the lightning is missing.
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