Bhooty Call 2025

 It's October, and the world is a scary place.  I think a monthlong celebration of the ghosts of Bollywood would help me feel better, though, so once again it's time for a Bhooty Call.

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. 

 

Ship of Fools

 As the  title implies, Housefull 5 (2025) is the latest installment in the Housefull franchise.  It's not a literal sequel; the movies in the series will share some actors, character names, and a tendency toward broad comedy, but storylines and even genres will change from installment to installment.  Housefull 4 was a reincarnation comedy that doubled as a spoof of Indian mythological epics, while 5 is a murder mystery on a boat.  It was also released with two different endings, borrowing the central gimmick from Clue.  The mystery doesn't get in the way of the broad comedy, though.

Billionaire Rajneet Dobriyal (Rajneet Bedi) is hosting a birthday party on his private cruise ship as it sails from Newcastle to Scotland.  (The film doesn't specify where in Scotland.)  Before the cruise can get underway, though, Rajneet is discovered dead.  This isn't a big surprise, since the party is for Rajneet's 100th birthday, but son Dev (Fardeen Khan) and assorted members of the company and ship's crew decide to keep the death a secret until control of the company can be formally passed on to Dev, to protect the stock price.  However, Rajneet's lawyer Lucy (Soundarya Sharma) reveals that Rajneet left a will, which leaves everything to his other son Jolly.  None of them have met Jolly, but he will be joining them on the cruise, and he will be bringing his foreign-born wife.

 Sure enough, Jolly (Riteish Deshmukh) shows up on time, along with his wife Zara (Sonam Bajwa); she's from Afghanistan.  Then Jolly (Abhishek Bachchan) appears with his wife Shashikala (Jacqueline Fernandes) from Sri Lanka.  And then Jolly (Akshay Kumar) arrives, with his wife Kaanchi (Nargis Fakhri), from Nepal.  Dev asks the ship's doctor to perform blood tests, then the three Jollys are allowed to enjoy the ship while they wait for the results.

That night the ship's cook Pasta (Chunkey Pandey) slips something into everybody's drink, and the three Jollys wake up with the wrong people and no memory of what happened the night before.  But somebody has killed the ship's doctor, and the three Jollys are the natural suspects.

 The ship's head of security, Batuk Patel (Johnny Lever) locks the Jollys up, and they compare notes.  naturally, none of them are real, and none of them are married, so the six team up to solve the mystery before the ship reaches Scotland.  Meanwhile, Maya (Chitrangda Singh), the company's CFO, has called for help from her ex husband Baba (Jackie Shroff) and his partner Bhiddu (Sanjay Dutt), two maverick cops who play by their own rules.  It's a race to solve the mystery as the bodies pile up, with an extended Weekend at Bernies riff as the Jollys attempt to dispose of Ranjeet's body for reasons.  

 This is obviously a very silly movie; the Housefull franchise is nothing but very silly movies.  Some of the jokes hit better than others; Dutt and Shroff are a perfect parody of Indian movie cops in general and their own respective careers in particular, and Akshay-Jolly's blood feud with the ship's parrot is played perfectly straight.  (His rumble with two monkeys is less effective.)  Johnny Lever continues to be the King of this sort of broad comedy, mugging for the camera with style and skill.

However there's also a lot of focus on ogling the female cast members.  The treatment of lawyer Lucy is particularly egregious, as well as the scene where the Mrs. Jollys assure the audience and one another that the only possible way to sneak into the ship's medical center is by shimmying on their backs through the air ducts.  The Housefull series has always dabbled in sexual humor, but at times this comes across as a bit from The Benny Hill Show or Carry On Stabbing.  It's very much a Curate's Egg of a movie - good in parts, but I cannot vouch for the whole.

 

This diamond is forever.

 Bank receptionist Harleen Sahni (Katrina Kaif) leads a quiet life in snowy Simla with her grandmother (Kamlesh Gill).  Harleen is shy and afraid of life, and manages to come across as the mousy girl that nobody notices, apart from the bank's new VP (Pratik Dixit), who makes an inappropriate pass at her.  Finally, frustrated, Harleen makes a profile on a dating website, and since the movie is called Bang Bang! (2014), her life is bound to change one way or another.

 The website matches her with one person, Vicky Kapoor, but he's late. Very late.  However, when he does show up he's played by Hrithik Roshan, and he's kind of amazing.  He's patient, he listens to her, and he even teaches her to dance so that she can join in the inevitable (and terrific) big musical number.  A waitress spills a drink on Harleen so she slips away to the bathroom to clean up.  While she's there, she convinces herself that this is her big chance to live life to the fullest, and she wants Vicky to be a part of it, but when she comes out he's already gone.

 However the movie doesn't start with Harleen, it starts with Indian Army Colonel Viren Nanda (Jimmy Shergill), who arrives to take custody of international terrorist and criminal mastermind Omar Zafar (Danny Dengzongpa).  It doesn't go well.  Zafar's men arrive to free him, and in the process and despite his heroic efforts, Viren is horribly murdered while his mother listens on an open phone line.

Zafar wants to stir up some confusion (and put an end to a potential extradition treaty between the UK and India) so he offers a reward of five million dollars to any Indian who can steal the Koh-i-noor.  Someone promptly steals it, and soon enough master thief Rajveer (Hrithik Roshan) is in snowy Simla to get paid and hand over the diamond.  Zafar's enforcers try to double cross him, leading to a big fight and subsequent rooftop chase, and he ducks into a small cafe and spots Harleen sitting there alone, so he takes the place of her date.  Everything's going well until he spots his pursuers approaching, so he ends the dance number and engineers a spilled drink to get Harleen out of the way for the big fight scene.  When she comes out of the bathroom, Rajveer is gone, the police have arrived, the cafe is in shambles, and the manager hands her a large bill.  She gives the manager her bank VP's card and leaves.

On the way home she runs into Rajveer again.  Literally.  With her car.  He's not hurt too badly, though, and after she helps him sew up  a bullet wound from earlier, he warns her not to trust anyone who comes looking for him, tells her where to find a gun to use to escape if she winds up in a car being taken to a "safe" place, then leaves.

Harleen tries to go back to her old life, but everything happens as Rajveer predicted.  The police arrive, interrogate her, and decide to take her to a "safe" place, she finds the gun, and completely fails to intimidate anyone, then Rajveer arrives to rescue her and there's another huge action scene.  Rajveer and Harleen escape to Pizza Hut, and after the product placement is done they go on the run, bickering their way through a globetrotting adventure with stops in Mauritius and Prague while Harleen tries to decide if she can really trust Rajveer.  She probably shouldn't, because he's not really Rajveer either, and this isn't a heist movie, it's a spy movie.*

Bang Bang! isn't a part of the YRF Spy Universe, and it was never going to be; the film was made by a  different production company, and both of the lead actors play different and pivotal roles in the Spy Universe franchise.  It's a bombastic action movie with impossibly pretty people performing impossible stunts, but at heart, like the Spy Universe movies, this is a story about the need for human connection.  Harleen wants to connect to the world outside her small life, and Rajveer has been deliberately cut off from the people he loves.  They're both so desperate for connection that it's no surprise that they find it with one another.

The action scenes are ridiculous fun, the leads are (as mentioned) impossibly pretty, the jokes land more often than not, the romance is pretty good (though Rajveer tranquilizes Harleen more often than I am really comfortable with - there's always context but in the real world it's kind of a red flag) and of course the dance numbers are fantastic.  Because really, why even cast Hrithik and Katrina in your spy movie if you're not going to let them dance.

 

(*Specifically, this is a spy movie that serves as an authorized remake of the Hollywood movie Knight and Day, which I have never seen.) 

 

 

 

The rare Reverse Cyrano.

 We're living in a post-Dil Chahta Hai world.  Romance is complicated these days, and the real barrier to a couple finding true love is their own neuroses and insecurities, rather than wicked stepmothers, identical twins and Amrish Puri.  And that's fine - Dil Chahta Hai was a really good movie, and Bollywood was in dire need of a little psychological complexity for a long time.  Sometimes I miss the simple earnestness of the old days, but To Jhoothi Main Makkar (2023) is here to remind me to be careful what I wish for.

 Mickey Arora (Ranbir Kapoor) certainly seems like an old-school Bollywood romantic hero.  he's handsome, charming, rich, and lives with his eccentric but loving family, headed by his overbearing mother Renu (Dimple Kapadia), and father Ramesh (film producer Boney Kapoor in his acting debut) is there as well.  But Mickey doesn't just help run the family businesses, he and his best friend Manu (Anubhav Singh Bassi) have a secret side business managing breakups.  Not just any breakups, because there are rules - most importantly, they won't accept married clients, but if they accept the job, thye will help their clients to break up with their romantic partners without having to look like a jerk or feel guilty.  Mickey thinks of this as a public service, and maybe even an art form.

Manu has other issues.  he's engaged to Kinchi (Monica Chaudhary), and while she's great, she's so invested in the relationship that she invites herself along to Manu's bachelor trip to Spain.  Manu aks Mickey to do his thing, and he reluctantly agrees . . . until he meets Kinchi's best friend and fellow traveler Tinni (Shraddha Kapoor.)  Tinni is gorgeous, independent, and charming, and Mickey is immediately smitten.

Mickey drops Manu's case and  launches a full scale charm offensive, leading to a brief fling, but Tinni is surprised to learn that Mickey isn't only after one thing, he's interested in a real relationship.  When the party returns to Delhi, Manu and Kinchi are married, while Mickey brings Tinni around to meet the family.  The family are ecstatic, and Renu is soon talking about expanding the family home in order to accommodate the young couple.  Tinni is aggressively welcomed into the family, and everyone is really, really happy.

And then Mickey gets a call from a woman in need of his breakup services.  He starts slow, because he's distracted by his own upcoming engagement, but before long he notices that the new client's relationship events are closely coinciding with his own, and he soon realizes that yes, it's Tinni trying to find a graceful way to break up with him.  Mickey is faced with a moral dilemma; he knows that he's talking to Tinni, but she has no idea that the man she hired to help her leave Mickey is in fact Mickey.   At first he uses his suggested "relationship tests" to make himself look good, but Tinni isn't satisfied, and Mickey carries through with his job, hoping to at least find out why Tinni wants to leave.

When I watch romantic comedies, I often find myself saying "this is a problem that could be solved with five minutes of conversation," but I have never seen a couple so determined to avoid that conversation.  There are definite problems with their relationship; Tinni is a Dil Chahta Hai girl, modern, excruciatingly self aware, and hiding her pain with a smile, while Mickey is a Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge boy, earnest, determined, apparently carefree, and a lot more traditional than he appears.  Unfortunately, like Raj in DDLJ, he's also kind of low-key sexist and more than a little manipulative.  They come from differnet sub-genres, and they're looking for completely different things out of life.  Ranbir and Shraddha are both charming and attractive actors, and they display a natural chemistry, but for me to believe in this relationship it will take more than passionate speeches, a noble act of romantic self-sacrifice and a last minute dash to the airport, it will take lots and lots of therapy, and I'm not sure they're going to get that.

And yet, that was the case in a lot of nineties Bollywood movies as well.  (Like DDLJ, for instance.)  If you're willing to accept that movie relationships aren't always going to be healthy then this movie has a lot to offer.  The leads are charming, Dimple Kapadia is clearly having a great time and the rest of the family is happy to follow along, the dance numbers are great, and the film is occasionally very funny.  Just don't try any of this at home.

 

Another brief hiatus.

 I'm taking some time off for reasons - I'll be back when I'm good and ready!

"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.