Enter the Joharaverse.

 Karan Johar didn't write or direct Nadaaniyan (2025), but he did produce it, and the film strives to capture the Karan Johar vibe, with young love, family drama, ludicrous misunderstandings, buckets of tears, and an appearance by Ms. Briganza (Archana Puran Singh), the pretentious English teacher with a heart of gold from Johar's debut movie, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.

 

Ms. Briganza is now Mrs. Briganza-Malhotra, which means that she finally managed to marry the goofy college principal played by Anupam Kher in KKHH, and good for them.  She is now the principal of Falcon High, a high school which is so prestigious and exclusive that the students don't have to wear uniforms.  Pia (Khushi Kapoor) is one of the wealthy students at Falcon, and she has a problem: her friends Sahira (Aaliyah Wureishi) and Rhea (Apoorva Makhija) aren't speaking to her for a range of fairly stupid reasons, but mostly because Sahira has a crush on the overbearing Ayaan (Dev Agestaya), and they assume that Pia is secretly dating him because he's been sending her a stream of pushy text messages which she never replied to.  Ayaan claims that yes, they are an item (they are not) and when Ayaan and her friends pressure her in the hall, Pia claims that she can't be dating Ayaan because she already has a boyfriend who is really cool and lives in Canadashe's just not ready to introduce him yet.

Of course, now she needs a fake boyfriend.  And after several false starts, she discovers Arjun (Ibrahim Ali Khan), a driven scholarship student with anger issues who stands out from the rest of the student body because is father is merely a doctor.  Arjun has plans, plans which include law school and eventually launching his dream app to make legal services more available to the common man, and to fulfill his dreams he will need money, while Pia is really, really rich, so she convinces him to pose as her boyfriend.

And you can probably guess where this is going.  The fake relationship requires them to spend real time together, and so they get to know each other, become friends, and maybe more?  There's drama along the way, mostly involving Pia's parents Rajat (Suniel Shetty) and Neelu (Mahima Chaudhry), who always wanted a boy to join the family business and didn't seem to realize that girls can also become lawyers, so mostly treat Pia with benign neglect.

Meanwhile, Ayaan finally starts dating Sahira so he can worm his way into the friend group and needle Arjun about being (relatively) poor.  He's unpleasant enough that Pia stands up to her friends to defend her fake boyfriend, and she and Arjun become even closer.  Suddenly she's starting to dream bigger and considering a career in law, and she pressures Arjun to let her join the debate club.  (He's the president, because of course he is.)  

And then everything goes wrong.  The couple attend a Diwali party together, and Arjun is immediately jealous of Pia's family friend Rudra (Meezaan Jafri) and leaves early because they have a big debate tournament, so he isn't there when Pia's family falls apart completely and she and her mother leave to stay at Rudra's ancestral castle.  She misses the debate tournament, and before she can contact Arjun a photograph of her being comforted by Rudra leaks to the press, so when they return to school Arjun angrily reveals the fake boyfriend scheme to the entire school, publicly and utterly humiliating her.  

 

That ought to be the end of it (Rahul never treated Anjali that badly) but this is supposed to be a romantic comedy so of course they're bound to get together in the end, though Piua can't get through her reconciliation speech without pointing out what a terrible idea it is.

A lot of the criticism of Nadaaniyan focuses non the fact that both of the leads have strong family ties to the Bollywood industry - Khushi Kapoor is the daughter of  the legendary Sridevi, and Ibrahim Ali Khan is the son of Saif Ali Khan.  But many of the actors in the industry, including a slew of the current big names, got their start through family connections, and while there is a serious conversation to be had about nepotism in Bollywood I don't think we can hold the star kids responsible for trying to succeed in the industry as it exists.  The kids are fine. Kapoor is appropriately wistful during her narration, and while Khan has room to grow, I've seen Saif Ali's early films and he's a great actor. Now.

No, the real problem with the movie is that nobody is very likable.  Pia is self-absorbed, her friends are awful, her parents are a nightmare, and Arjun is short-tempered and quick to jump to conclusions.  His parents are nice, I guess.

 This is the Karan Johar formula, but it's the wrong Karan Johar formula; it's hyper-competative high conflict Student of the Year rather than warm and fuzzy Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, and I really didn't like Student of the Year.

Ms. Briganza is always a delight, though, and I'm glad she's doing well. 

Fruit, forbidden.

 

I'm not sure what I was expecting from Kathal: A Jackfruit Mystery (2023), but it still managed to surprise me.  One thing's for sure - it's not really about jackfruit.

 Mahima Basor (Sanya Malhotra) is a Deputy Superintendent of Police in the town of Moba in Uttar Pradesh.  It isn't always easy; in addition to the usual small town police politics, Mahima is a member of the Basor caste, and faces low-key discrimination, sometimes even from her own subordinates.  To make things even more complicated, she was dating Sub-Inspector Saurabh Dwivedi (Anant V Joshi) before her promotion; they're still trying to make the relationship work, but he's now her direct subordinate.

Still, Mahima is very good at her job, and after watching her supervisors take credit for a dangerous and high profile criminal she captured, Mahima is assigned her next case.  Two jackfruitrs were stolen from the home of local politician Munnalal Pateria (Vijay Raaz), and he wants them back.  They are not ordinary local jackfruits, they are "Uncle Hong" jackfruit from Malaysia, and when picked they are so delicious that he can trade them for political favors.

 Clearly there are more important things the police should be focused on, but Pateria is a powerful and important person, so despite her protests Mahima and her quirky subordinates are on jackfruit duty.  Suspicion quickly falls on former gardener Birwa Mali (Ambrish Saxena).  However, when she gets the chance to interview him, She discovers that Mali has been desperately searching for his eighteen year old daughter Amiya (Apoorva Chaturvedi.)  Digging deeper she learns that Amiya is only one of a number of girls who have vanished in the area and the disappearances have been largely ignored by the police.  Even worse, Mali had approached Saurabh earlier and been ignored.

Mahima has an idea.  She convinces Mali to claim that Amiya stole the jackfruit, which means that suddenly suddenly the police department is using all its resources to find the missing girl.  It also means that mahima will be in huge trouble if anyone finds out, and the faintly ridiculous local amateur journalist Anuj Sanghvi (Rajpal Yadav) doesn't believe the story for a second.

Meanwhile, Mahima also has to deal with the cracks in her relationship with Saurabh, who is both her subordinate and of a higher caste, and has been behaving like a typical Indian movie cop.  Not even his famous berry chutney can make this better.

It's not unusual for an Indian movie to play with genres, and Kathal does it better than many.  It's an interesting mix of quirky character-driven comedy, police melodrama about human trafficking, and complicated drama about a woman forced to navigate a corrupt system who finds a way to make her corner of the world just a little bit better.  But the impressive thing is that it maintains a fairly consistent tone throughout.  It helps that the good guys are quirky but not hilarious, the bad guys are dangerous but not particularly competent, Amiya is more than just a victim, and Anuj, the ridiculous looking wannabe reporter played by legendary comic actor Rajpal Yadav, turns out to be very good at his job.  It's the kind of movie that seems like it should be a black comedy, but winds up hopeful instead.

Like Jane Austen with guns.

 Dhoom Dhaam (2025) opens with a violent robbery, and a masked man with a mouthful of blood, but forget about that for now - this is a romantic comedy.

 

The families of Koyal Chadda (Yami Gautam) and Veer Poddar (Pratik Gandhi) are just putting the final touches on their impending arranged marriage.  The pandit has compared their horoscopes, and it's an amazing match, like ram and Sita only nobody has to be set on fire.  There's only one catch - the couple need to be married within the next two weeks, or they'll have to wait two and a half years for the next auspicious date.  Do they accept?

 They do.  Cut to the honeymoon suite, where Veer awkwardly prepares to make his move.  Suddenly there's a knock on the door, and two armed men (Eijiz Khan and Pavitra Sarkar) burst in and demand that Veer tells them where Charlie is.  Veer patiently tries to explain that he doesn't know any Charlie, but they don't believe him, and things are about to turn violent when Koyal throws boiling water at them, picks up the gun, and drives the men away.  Briefly.  The pair make their escape and pick up some shoes from a neighboring hotel room; Koyal gets sensible flats while Veer is stuck with fluffy bunny slippers.

The pair try calling their families, only to learn that they are all playing cards with a new friend named Pradeep (Anand Potdukhe), and when the family hands Pradeep the phone he demands to know where Charlie is.  They get a call from a CID officer named Sanjay Reberio (Mukul Chadda), who delivers some useful exposition and urges them to bring him Charlie as soon as they can.

 This sends Koyal and Veer on a scavenger hunt through the city, while dodging their armed and increasingly angry pursuers.  What does Charlie have to do with Koyal's skeezy ex boyfriend Arya (Prateik Babbar)?  Or her aggressively cheerful uncle Kushwant (Kavin Dave)?  Those are plot details, and they matter less than you might think, because this is a romantic comedy.

Okay, it's also an action comedy, but the real focus is on Veer and Koyal finally getting to know each other.  Veer discovers that Koyal isn't the sheltered and highly traditional girl she's been presented as, but also that she is brave and compassionate and has learned some hard lessons trying to navigate modern India as a woman, while Koyal discovers that Veer is the naive veterinarian that he appears to be, but he's also riddled with phobias and still is willing to risk everything to protect his new wife.  There's some tension about whether they'll find Charlie in time, but the real question is whether or not they'll choose to stay married.

Yami Gautam and Pratik Gandhi are charming, with an easygoing chemistry, so while this is a decent action comedy it's a pretty good romantic comedy.

 

No rockets. Just Tarzan.

 Adventures of Tarzan (1985) is a product of the golden age of Bollywood plagiarism, a time when you could pad out your Tarzan movie with songs lifted from The Sound of Music. At its best, it's the kind of movie I that I can use the sentence "Tarzan incapacitates the snipers with thrown guitars" when summarizing.  At it's worst . . . well, we'll get to that.

 

Tarzan (Hemant Birje) is a legendary figure, believed to live somewhere deep in the jungles of India.  When circus owner Krishnakant Verma (Narendranath Malhotra) sees a news report about a recent Tarzan sighting, he hires big game hunter D. K. (Dalip Tahil) to capture the wild man so he can force him to perform in the circus, because that's much easier than hiring an acrobat and having them dress up as Tarzan.

 D. K. teams up with shady archeologist Shetty (Om Shivpuri), who is leading an expedition to discover the lost civilization of Shakhabhumi.  Soon they're joined by Shetty's estranged daughter Ruby (Kimi Katkar), who traveled thousands of miles to tell her father she hates him, but reconciles with him almost immediately and is soon hanging around the expedition and occasionally wandering into the jungle.

 At night the expedition members can hear Tarzan's cry echoing through the jungle, and occasionally stragglers are carried off - not by Tarzan, by a problematic tribe of angry natives and their enormous Chief (Gorilla, and that is the actor's screen name; I'm not editorializing) but everyone assumes that Tarzan is responsible for everything bad.

After sneaking off to bathe in a river, Ruby is attacked by a rubber crocodile, and rescued by Tarzan.  She drives him away with her pistol.  On another day,  she's bitten by a venomous snake, and Tarzan saves her again.  At this point it's getting dark and she doesn't know how to get back to camp, so she embraces her narrative roll and falls in love with Tarzan instead.  

In the morning Tarzan takes her back to the camp, and D. K. and the others immediately shoot at him.  From here things proceed as you might expect, alternating between jungle peril and the developing romance.  Ruby sings a song as she tries to teach Tarzan the English alphabet for some reason, and in another scene she's abducted by natives.

One day, while Ruby is in the jungle making friends with all of the stock footage animals, the natives attack the expedition and wipe out nearly everybody, except for D. K. and his personal henchmen.  Tarzan fights the natives, but D. K. takes the opportunity to tranquilize Tarzan and capture him and Ruby.

 D. K. delivers Tarzan to the circus, and he plans to force Ruby to marry him, but it's soon clear that the only way they can get Tarzan to cooperate with the show is by directly threatening Ruby, so that's what they do.  D. K. and Verma add her to the show; she'll sing while Tarzan performs feats of acrobatics, then after the first night D. K. will forcibly marry her.  They plan to have snipers with rifles placed about the tent to keep Tarzan in line, but they don't have a backup plan in case Tarzan incapacitates the snipers with thrown guitars, and they really didn't count on a small army of jungle animals attacking the city to rescue their friend.

This in sot a good movie, but it's generally on the pulpy side of ridiculous. It's also structured like a King Kong movie rather than a Tarzan movie, with Tarzan treated as a figure of legend, the ruthless hunter, the kind woman who touches the ape-man's heart, and the greedy showman who refuses to cancel his exhibition despite being clearly warned about his impending doom.

 

I would probably like it a lot more if it wasn't so damned sleazy. It's not so much Ruby's skimpy costumes; that's in genre for both tarzan and Kong..  It's the fact that Ruby is repeatedly threatened with sexual assault, by D. K., by the natives, and even by two random sailors he meets while traveling to join her father in a scene which  doesn't connect the plot and seems to be there to establish that Ruby has a gun and isn't afraid to use it, though after shooting the sailors she goes on her way, and only uses the gun to scare Tarzan during their first meeting.  The movie opens with a flashback to a woman (presumably Tarzan's mother, but they never really spell out his origins)  dragged off screaming by the natives after watching her husband being murdered.  Sexual assault as a plot device was distressingly common in the Bollywood of the eighties, but this movie really leans into it.

In other words, tone is a serious problem here.  The movie wants to be light hearted pulpy and romantic fun,  but it's a bit too enthusiastic about putting its heroine in peril, and while Bollywood has never been good at portraying Adivasi communities, this movie is particularly bad about that as well.  There are some fun bits, but if you want Tarzan, you might be better off just reading the books.

 

 

The Man Who Wasn't There

 Mr. India is easily the most famous movie about an invisible hero, but it's far from the only one.  Elaan (1971) also features the hero given a high-tech invisibility ring by a friendly scientist, but while Mr.India is a superhero movie at heart, Elaan feels like a spy movie. Specifically an Italian Bond knockoff from the sixties.

Naresh (Vinod Mehra) isn't a superspy with an eye for the ladies, though. As the film opens,he's a freelance journalist with an eye for one particular lady: Mala (Rekha). They meet on the beach, and Malais offended at having her picture taken, so she rides off on a horse and in a huff. The horse promptly gallops out of control, giving Naresh a chance to ride to the rescue. That doesn't impress Mala, because she's unconscious, but it does impress her father, newspaper publisher Mehta (Brahm Bhardwaj), who offers him a job. After further humorous misunderstandings, Mala falls for Naresh as well, and they're soon a happy couple.

Mehta assigns Naresh and comic relief sidekick Shyam (Rajendra Nath) to investigate an apparently haunted island.  It turns out that the island is the base for an international syndicate of unspecified evil, and after a little torture to establish that Naresh and Shyam aren't police officers, the Boss (M. B. Shetty) sends Lily (Helen) to perform an item number and then recruit them into the organization. Shyam does have an eye for the ladies, so he distracts Lily and the other femmes fatale, while Naresh sneaks off and gets captured again.

 Naresh is thrown into a cell with violent criminal Ram Singh (Vinod Khanna) and an ailing scientist (Ratan Guarang).  Naresh is kind to the scientist, who gives him his hidden atomic ring, which can be used toi turn invisible when placed in the mouth, though only if the user is completely naked.  Ram Singh just gives Naresh punches. With the help of the ring, Naresh and Shyam flee the island.

The Boss sends Lily and Ram Singh to kill Naresh and retrieve the ring,  as well as to collaborate on a counterfeiting scheme with shady hotel owner Verma (Madan Puri doing his best Adopho Celi impression) and his hypnotist sidekick, the Professor (Jankidas.)  (Verma's gang is largely made up of beautiful women who may or may not have been hypnotized.)  

 Along the way, Mehta is murdered, and Naresh, Shyam and Mala all wind up under the protection of the Central Bureau of Investigation.  In the day or so since her father's death, Mala has become a trained and certified CBI agent ("People change," as she explains to Naresh) and she's sent undercover as "Mary" to infiltrate the counterfeiting scheme, while Naresh and Shyam are sort of deputized and given silly disguises and sent to verify that yes, that is Lily performing at Verma's nightclub.

In a proper Bond movie, or even a high end knockoff, the characters would be traveling the world at this point, bouncing from one beautiful city to the next; even Operation Kid Brother managed to include visits to Malaga, Morocco, and Munich.  Not here, though.  Mala hangs around Verma's place waiting to be shown the counterfeiting machine, Naresh alternates between acting as Mala's invisible guardian angel and bumming around Bombay in a series of silly disguises, and the Boss, Verma and Ram Singh all compete to see who can betray the others first.

This is Bond on the cheap, with an equally budget friendly sci-fi twist; the fact that the ring only works when the user is naked means that the producers don't have to spend any money on partial invisibility effects. It's all very slight and very silly, and nobody ever dresses up as Charlie Chaplin, but it's reasonably entertaining, there are multiple Helen dance numbers, and Young Rekha is adorable.

 

We could've been anything that we wanted to be.

Bugsy Malone (1976) doesn't sound like a real movie. The premise is ridiculous on its face; it's a G-rated gangster melodrama set in Prohibition-era New York, with a cast made up entirely of child actors. Oh, and it's a musical!  However, this is a movie that commits completely to the bit, and it has a couple of secret weapons hiding up  its sleeve.

The young cats present themselves as adults, and some of the boys are even sporting period appropriate mustaches, but everything is presented through a child-friendly lens; the vintage cars are pedal-powered, the liquor racket is replaced by the sarsaparilla racket, and most importantly, nobody gets shot, they get splurged.  Traditionally this takes the form of an old-fashioned pie to the face, but Dandy Dan (Martin Lev) has armed his gang with splurge guns, which are basically Tommy guns that use whipped cream instead of bullets.  However you're splurged, though, the effects are the same. You don't die, but you're washed up, out of the game, and out of the movie.

Dandy Dan's gang are the only ones with splurge guns,which means they're cutting a swathe through the businesses run by Dan's rival, Fat Sam (John Cassisi), who owns the speakeasy where much of the action takes place.  Sam controls a gang of mostly lovable incompetents, most notably Knuckles (Sheridan Earl Russell), who earned his name by constantly cracking his knuckles.  Sam is also dating the film's family friendly femme fatale, Tallulah (Jodie Foster), who is the speakeasy's star performer.

Tallulah is not the speakeasy's only performer, though, so singer and aspiring Hollywood actress Blousey Brown (Florrie Dugger) arrives to audition for a role in the chorus,only to be told that Sam is busy and she should "come back tomorrow."  At the speakeasy she also meets Bugsy Malone (Scott Baio), a struggling boxing promoter, and she finds him reasonably charming.  The pair strike up a low-key friendship.

Things are getting worse and worse for Sam. Dandy Dan is squeezing his business dry, and most of his men are lured into an ambush and splurged. Sam desperately tries to pretend that it's business as usual, and hires Looney, a hitman from out of town, to take down Dandy Dan.  He's going to need a driver, though, and Knuckles can't drive.

 Blousey is auditioning across town to replace diva Lena Morelli (Bonnie Langford), with Bugsy there to give moral support,but before she can sing a note Lena strolls in and takes her old job back.  Bugsy takes her back to Sam's place for another audition, and this time she gets her shot. She also spots Bugsy with Tallulah,and while there's really nothing going on there Tallulah still plants a chaste kiss on Bugsy's forehead.  (G-rating, remember?)  Blousey has had enough.

Bugsy needs to win Blousey back. He wants to take her to Hollywood, but to do that he'll need money. The good news is that Fat Sam is looking for a driver for a special job. And so begins Bugsy's G-rated spiral into a life of crime. The movie's only 93 minutes long, so there isn't much actual criming involved,and what little criming there is is directed at dandy Dan and his gang.

So, the movie is mostly a harmless ball of fluff with a bizarre premise. Why watch it today?  First, the songs, written and largely performed by Paul Williams, range from (in my highly scientific and impartial opinion) pretty good to great.

And then there's the acting. The assembled child actors are, for the most part, fine.  They're clearly having a good time, and that sense of fun counts for a lot, but they can't help but be overshadowed when they're standing next to Jodie Foster, who at this point had spent years honing her craft on TV and the Disney family film treadmill, as well as a few months of personal acting lessons with Robert De Niro on the set of Taxi Driver, which came out earlier in 1976.  Tallulah is a relatively small part, but it's a good part, and Foster's careful craft shines next to the talented amateurs around her. I've never seen an actor stand out from the rest of the cast that much before.

 

All the monsters are metaphorical.

 Dharam Veer (1977) is not a movie that fits into neat genre categories. It's a sprawling mess of a movie, really,but it's got it all - fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles, and a dubious grasp of historical accuracy.

I'll start at the beginning.  No,it's too much - let me sum up.  Princess Meenakshi (Indrani Mukherjee) lives in a small kingdom in a poorly defined historical period.  One day while out hunting she kills a tiger, only to be attacked by ruffians who are secretly employed by her evil brother Satpal (Jeevan); Satpal was warned by a prophecy that he will be killed by his oldest nephew, and figures that the easiest way to avoid it is to kill his sister before she can have any children.  However, she's saved by Jwala Singh (Pran), a humble woodsman who happens to be an expert fighter and "master of Samurai," according to the subtitles, who roams the land with his twin katanas and a well trained falcon named Sheroo (played by Sheroo the Wonder Bird, and sometimes a puppet.). Jwala takes the princess back to his cabin to recover, and she promises him anything to repay him for saving her life.  And that's when Jwala tells her the truth: he's loved her from afar for a long time,and the only thing he wants is her hand in marriage. She can marry him on the spot,or return to the palace knowing that she's broken her vow. 

She marries him on the spot. They spend the night together, but they are interrupted by a prowling tiger which Jwala announces is trying to avenge its mate.  He goes out tiger hunting, katana in hand, and discovers a man who had been tiger-killed,so he drapes his shirt over the man and drops his katana, only to be attacked by the tiger and falls with it into the river and an uncertain fate. Meenakshi discovers the body shrouded in her new husband's shirt, and because this is the Kingdom of People Who Jump to Conclusions, she stumbles home in a catatonic daze and is married to the only king who is willing to take her in this condition.  By the time she emerges from her fugue, she's married.  She explains that she was already married,and her new husband turns out to be really understanding; he promises to treat her as a queen in public and as a widow in private, and when he learns that she's pregnant he promises to raise her son as his heir.

He may be a little too understanding, though. Satpal was exiled because of the whole "plotting to murder his sister" thing, but when he turns up at her door apparently repentant, he's welcomed and charged with protecting his sister when her husband goes off to war. Meenakshi and Satpal's wife give birth on the same night, and Satpal sneaks off with his nephew and throws him from the wall of the castle, only to see Sheroo the falcon swoop down and carry the baby away.  When it turns out that Meenakshi had twins, Satpal switches his son with his younger nephew so that his son will be the heir, but when everyone is asleep his wife swaps the babies back without telling him.

Sheroo carries the baby to his master,who was in a coma for the last nine months and being tended to by a kindly blacksmith (Hercules) and his wife.  Jwala wakes up and discovers that Meenakshi left after the tiger attack,and because this is The Kingdom of People Who Jump to Conclusions, he wanders off to mope for the next twenty years.

The Blacksmith names the baby Dharam , and raises him until he grows up enough to be played by Dharmendra.  Dharam is a natural hero, strong and virtuous, and he's best friends with Prince Veer (Jeetendra), who is secretly Prince Veer.  Everyone dotes on him, especially his uncle Satpal. Veer and Dharam sing a song about how their friendship is one of the wonders of the world and can never be broken as they wander the land being generally heroic.

While wandering the land being generally heroic, Dharam and Veer stumble into a large arena where the evil Princess Pallavi (Zeenat Aman) hosts jousting competitions. naturally  Dharam decides to joust, and naturally he's brilliant at it, but it's really an excuse to get close to Pallavi. He wins and she promises him anything he wants.  He asks for her hand, and she orders her men to kill him. 

Dharam and Veer escape the assorted guards and gladiators trying to kill them, but Dharam goes back so that he can hit on Pallavi while she tortures him.  Meanwhile Veer takes refuge with a band of Banjara, and plots a rescue with the help of the dancer Roopa (Neetu Singh).  After the escape Dharam goes back again, this time kidnapping Pallavi and winning her heart through his inherent manliness. It's a sequence that has not aged at all well and drags on a bit too long, but eventually it ends and Pallavi loves Dharam, Roopa loves Veer, and Dharam is learning the art of Samurai from Jwala, who is still alive and has become an embittered hermit with two katanas and a trained falcon named Sheroo.  (Sheroo is remarkably spry for a bird of his age.)

Everybody is happy, but there is a closet full of shoes that are waiting to drop. When Satpal finds out that Veer isn't his son after all, he gathers an Injustice League made up of all the enemies Dharam and Veer have made in the movie so far: his actual son, Pallavi's brother, Pallavi's fiance, and Roopa's fiance, who was also the leader of the Banjara band until Dharam overthrew him. The first order of business is to drive a wedge between Dharam and Veer, and that turns out to be surprisingly easy when you live in the Kingdom of People Who Jump to Conclusions and you're not worried about massive collateral damage.

Dharam and Veer are manipulated into a duel, secrets are revealed, and all the characters get on ships because now it's a swashbuckling pirate movie.  It's exciting but confusing,which kind of sums up the movie as a whole. The good news is that Pallavi and Roopa get to join in on the swashbuckling fun.