I need some dramatic relief.

 Son of Sardaar 2 (2025) is not a direct sequel to 2012's Son of Sardaar; it shares a title, some cast members and character names, a genre (romantic action-comedy), and a general theme of an upright Punjabi man navigating sometimes brutal family politics in the name of love.  Not all of the cast returns, however.  There's no Sanjay Dutt, and sadly there's no Juhi Chawla either.

 

 

 Jassi (Ajay Devgn) is a humble and devout farmer living a simple life with his mother (Dolly Ahluwalia).  Jassi is married, but his wife Dimple (Neeru Bajwa) has been living in Scotland for the last eleven years, and Jassi has been waiting all that time for a visa so he can finally join her.  And then the day finally arrives, Jassi flies to Edinburgh, and is reunited with Dimple, who introduces him to her boyfriend and announces that she wants a divorce.  Jassi is devastated, and spends the next month moping on the couch of a friend from his ancestral village.

Jassi can't couch-surf forever, though, and after a humorous misunderstanding in which Pakistani wedding dancer Rabia (Mrunal Thakur) stabs him with a fork, she invites him to stay with her troupe.  Rabia has her own problems; her husband Danish (Chunky Panday) has abandoned her, her stepdaughter Saba (Roshni Walia) is in love with spoiled rich boy Goggi (Sahil Mehta) but refuses to let him meet her family, and her friends and roommates Mehwish (Kubbra Sait) and Gul (Deepak Dobriyal) are . . . pretty great, actually.  But Rabia is under a lot of stress.

 Things get worse when Goggi proposes; his father Raja (Ravi Kishan) is a powerful man with a huge sheep farm, a dubious past, and a bunch of heavily armed henchmen.  Raja is also a proud Indian from Punjab, and due to his own overly complicated backstory, he will not accept a daughter-in-law who is Pakistani, or even worse, a dancer.  This calls for a wacky scheme, with Jassi roped in to act as Saba's father and Rabia's husband.  And because this is a movie the lies spiral out of control from there, with Jassi posing as a retired Indian Army Colonel presiding over  a family which is definitely not from Pakistan, while Raja and his dimwitted brothers try to catch them in a lie.  Jassi wants to run, but he is a Sardaar, and he cannot turn his back on people in need, or ignore his developing feelings for Rabia.

This is a very silly movie.  I say that a lot, and usually I mean that the movie is trying to be an insubstantial bit of comedic fluff, and should be judged on those terms.  Son of Sardaar 2 is a very silly movie, and that's a bad thing.  The movie has a heart, and the performances are good, but everything is buried under a thick layer of farce, and all of the jokes land with heavy thuds, one after the other.  The basic plot is fine, but the details are baroque and need to be fixed; it's hard to take the underlying romance seriously when everything is sidetracked by the tragic accidental death of Raja's English stepmother, the former pole dancer.  

 

Still, the city is gorgeous, though they never do explain how Rabia can afford her spacious apartment located just off the Royal Mile.