At least there's no swastika hat.

Coolie No. 1 (2020) is a very close remake of 1995's Coolie No. 1, with Govinda swapped out for director David Dhawan's own son Varun.  It's a very close remake, so I'm not entirely sure why Dhawan bothered, but I will say this for him - as a director, he is incredibly consistent.  For good or ill, if you are watching a David Dhawan film, you are going to get a David Dhawan film, and this movie represents Dhawan at his Dhawaniest.

The plot is almost identical to the earlier movie.  Marriage broker Pandit Jai Kishen (Jaaved Jaafri) is humiliated by hotel owner Jeffrey Rozario (Paresh Rawal) when he brings a potential groom to meet Rozario's daughter Sarah (Sara Ali Khan).  Rozario insists that his daughter deserves a very wealthy man, and nobody who arrived by bus could possibly be good enough.

Kishen vows revenge, and as he stands in the train station glaring darkly at a picture of Sarah a gust of wind snatches the photo and deposits it on Raju (Varun Dhawan), who immediately falls in love with the girl in the picture.  Raju is a penniless orphan with an improbably backstory involving Chekhov's Long Lost Mother, but he's also handsome and probably charming and really easy to convince, which makes him the perfect vehicle for Kishen's revenge.  All they have to do is convince Rozario that Raju is really Kuwar Raj Pratap Singh, a billionaire prince from Singapore.

And with the help of Raju's mechanic friend Deepak (Sahil Vaid) and a borrowed car, they do exactly that, because while Rozario is constantly congratulating himself on his brain power, he's actually really gullible.  Sarah also falls for the "prince", while her sister Anju (Shikha Talsania) falls for Deepak after a two minute conversation.  As in the first movie, Kishen and Raju seal the deal by bringing Rozario to a rented mansion that actually belongs to Mahendra Pratap Singh (Anil Dhawan - yep!  David's brother), the billionaire whose son Raju is pretending to be.

The plot points continue to follow the first movie.  Sarah begs to go to the mansion in Mumbai.  Raju fakes a fight with his wealthy "father", then take s his new bride to a rented house.  Rozario arrives in town and sees Raju working as a coolie, leading to Raju inventing an alcoholic wastrel twin brother who is doing a permanent Mithun Chakroborty impression, and Rozario decides that said alcoholic wastrel would be the perfect husband for Anju.  The drug dealer (Vikar Verma)  Raju got arrested at the beginning of the movie turns out to be Mahendra Pratap Singh's real son, and there's a stabbing and a climactic fight scene at the hospital in which Raju and Deepak are in drag.  

There are some differences.  On the plus side, Rozario never slips drugs into anybody's drink, making him a bit less despicable than 1995's Hoshiyar Chand.  That's good.  On the other hand, because the plot is so familiar, the movie speeds through the early setup; Raju and Kishen don't have an earlier connection, so they are planning ti defraud people within minutes of their first meeting, and while Raju has a backstory laid out in the opening cartoon, a backstory which is not followed up on at all, the movie spends no time establishing his hunger for family, companionship and respect, the thing that's supposed to actually motivate him.  It's like trying to remake The Wrath of Khan without Space Seed - you can see where the emotional beats are supposed to go, but none of them have been earned.

Otherwise, it's like the first Coolie No. 1, an incredibly broad farce about terrible people committing fraud and never feeling a smidgen of guilt.  Normally in this kind of movie the hero is tormented by a guilty conscience, and their lies are exposed before they can get married, but not here!

Still, in a sense Coolie No. 1 is an impressive achievement; it's a disappointing remake of a movie that I didn't like very much the first time.