Dating is hard.

 

Indoo Ki Jawani (2020) opens as an ordinary sex comedy.  Indira Gupta (Kiara Advani), affectionately known as "Indoo", is the most beautiful girl in her neighborhood, the object of desire for all the local teenage boys and middle-aged men who should really know better.  It's annoying more than anything else.  Indoo is far more interested in her boyfriend Satish (Raghav Raj Kakker), who in turn is interested in only one thing.  Indoo wants to wait for marriage, while Satish promises that he'll talk to her parents on the morning after.  Indoo's best friend Sonal (Mallika Dua) is a neverending font of bad advice, and she convinces Indoo to just get it over with, but Indoo walks in on Satish and another woman instead.  Sonal isn't done, and instead convinces Indoo to find a one-night stand on "Dinder".  After messaging some terrible men, Indoo finds Samar (Aditya Seal), an aspiring musician from Hyderabad, and invites him around the house when her parents are out of town.

But this is Bollywood, and genre boundaries are really loose guidelines at best.   While Indoo enjoys her awkward date with Samar, occasionally calling Sonal for more awful advice, the police are tearing the city apart searching for a pair of Pakistani terrorists.  And at the worst possible time Samar drops his passport, and Indoo learns that he's not form Hyderabad in India, he's from Hyderabad in Pakistan.  Indoo has seen too many movies and jumps to all of the wrong conclusions - he grabs a knife and orders Samar to leave her house, then drags him back inside when she realizes that the neighbors are watching and will jump to wrong conclusions of their own.

Spoiler - Samar is not really a terrorist.  It's not really that much of a spoiler, really. The movie throws some red herrings in that direction, but Samar is a consistently decent guy, and from a dramatic standpoint he pretty much has to be; Indoo is stewing in some unexamined prejudice, and she really needs to be proven wrong.  She is, but not before a stream of mistakes, including inviting the actual terrorist inside to keep an eye on Samar.

This is not really an action movie.  There are a few fight scenes, but they're short, and Samar fights like a desperate man who doesn't really know what he's doing but hopes he can overwhelm the enemy with persistence and a bit oif luck.  The terrorist plot is really just an excuse to lock these to in a house together so they can talk, and they do.  They get to know each other better, and Indoo learns a valuable lesson about judging by appearances.  Ultimately it's a silly romance with engaging leads and a really strange premise.

 And of course they never get around to having sex, because that wouldn't be funny.