"Bantuka4" is a pun aimed directly at me.

 Shehzada (2023) has one of the classic Indian movie plot lines: a street-smart youngster moves in with a wealthy family under false pretenses and proceeds to make everyone's lives better. resolving longstanding conflicts through honesty, pluck, and cheeky charm.  The only real difference is that in this movie, the youngster is actually helping his own family.  (And even that has been done many times already; this movie is a remake of the Telugu film Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo,)

 On a rainy night, the wealthy Randeep (Ronit Roy) and his employee Valmiki (Paresh Rawal) find themselves in the same hospital, eagerly awaiting the births of their respective sons.  Then tragedy strikes - Valmiki learns from a nurse (Sharvari Lohokare) that Randeep's son has stopped breathing, and he convinces the nurse to quietly swap the infants, claiming that the sacrifice is the least he can do for his beloved employee.  When the not dead after all infant starts crying and the nurse wants to switch the babies back, the truth comes out: Valmiki and Randeep started in the company at the same time, but Randeep married the CEO's daughter and became rich while Valmiki continued to struggle, but now he'll see his own son raised in luxury no matter what.  The nurse protests, they struggle, and she falls, slipping into a coma for the next twenty five years.

Twenty five years later, Valmiki still works for the company, and he dotes on the family's spoiled and hapless heir, Raj (Ankur Rathee), while pressuring and berating Bantu (Karthik Aaryan), the man everyone thinks is his son.  Still, Bantu has earned a law degree and fights like a South Indian movie hero when he has to beat up a group of toughs and recover the shawl they stole from his sister Nisha (Debattama Saha), while Raj owns a toy car which he uses to get from room to room in his own house.

 Bantu needs a job, and he applies to be the assistant to Samara (Kriti Sanon), but she turns him down, since most of the people who apply to her law firm have degrees from Ivy League colleges while Bantu went to school in India.  However, he later discovers Samara being menaced by a potential client in a restaurant, and saves the day with his quick wit, quicker reflexes and knowledge of the Indian legal code.  he gets the job, and soon they are flirting up a storm.

Raj faces a test of his own.  Randeep sends him to negotiate with family nemesis Sarang, a toy manufacturer who used the family's transport business to smuggle drugs.  When Randeep learned what happened, he was banned from using the Jindal family planes, but for some reason he is not in jail and is demanding to be allowed to do business with them again.  All Raj has to do is say no.  He fails the test, but Randeep makes the family position clear, and Sarang plans revenge.

The things start to happen quickly.  Samara's father (Rakesh Bedi) arranges a marriage between Samara and Raj, and she confesses to Bantu that she'd much rather marry him.  The young couple hope to explain things to Randeep, but when they arrive at his office he's just been stabbed by an umbrella-wielding Sarang, and Bantu gets to show his action hero chops again while rushing Randeep to the hospital.  And once Randeep is safe, Bantu meets the nurse from twenty five years ago, who emerges from her coma just long enough to tell him about the baby swap, then dies before she can tell anyone else, leaving him with the truth but no evidence.

 Randeep's father-in-law Aditya (Sachin Khedekar) invites the young hero to the house, and they quickly bond.  Soon Bantu has a new job working for the family, and he sets out to make everybody's lives better.  Dealing with Sarang is actually the easy part; he also has to convince Raj to take responsibility for himself, as well as reconcile Randeep and his estranged wife Yashoda (Manisha Koirala), and Yashoda has no intention of making it easy.

If a masala film like this one is going to be successful, a lot of things have to go right.  The action scenes have to be kinetic and fun, the romantic leads need good chemistry, the music and dancing has to be on point, and the senior actors need to deliver a dose of honest emotion.  And this worked for me; Koirala is probably the standout in the cast, but Aaryan balances an easy swaggering charm with a genuine moral core.  I liked his Bantu a lot more than Allu Arjun's Bantu in Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo - in the earlier film Bantu was a sexist jerk at times, while in Shehzada Bantu has a big hero speech about how no means no.  

 

However, Shehzada was a flop while Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo was a big hit, which just goes to show you that my taste is suspect.