Starring- Varun Dhawan, Shradha Kapoor and Prabhu Deva
Rating- 2.5 stars
ABCD 2 is Chak De India on the dance floor. The ‘anti-national’ coach is replaced by the guilt ridden ‘cheating’ dance group, the girls of the hockey team are replaced by hip hop dancers and the grand international championship in a foreign land.
Alas Kabir Khan faced serious allegations of being a national traitor. In ABCD 2, the group is ridiculed for copying an international group at a local reality TV show; allegations so serious that I wanted to hand over a lollypop to everyone involved!! Plagiarism is a serious issue, agreed. Deal it seriously then. Instead the film shows a man refusing to pay for pizzas because it is delivered by one of the 9Cheating) group’s dancers, who moonlights as a pizza delivery boy!! Ahem!!
The group dancers, unlike unique girls of Kabir’s raakshaso ki sena, are a replica of each other. Important issues of Chak De like team work, women’s struggle in the sports world are sadly replaced by a dancer’s injured leg in ABCD 2. It’s this superficiality, this simplicity that never lets the film take off.
There is even a full sattar minute inspiring speech that comes from Suresh (Varun Dhawan) at a moment of crisis. In an attempt to do a Kabir Khan, he ends up being a Raghu giving faltu-ka-tu-Roadie-hain-Roadies-don’t-give-up-gyan to –I-will-give-100-%-to-all-tasks- contestants!! The dancers are all pepped up and all is hunky dory in the la la land!!
And then enters Vishnu (Prabhu Deva). All sorrows vanish. The world is a happier place. And you stop complaining. He holds you by your collar, asks you to leave everything aside and watch him as he effortlessly moves to Happy Hour. The man is such a brilliant dancer that suddenly the plummeting stars of this review rose from -10 to 10.
Dharmesh sir, Punit Pathak and their introduction dance sequences are spec-OMG-tacular!!!! It was heartwarming to see the director give importance to dancing. Hence the supporting cast gets equal screen presence as the main lead. Varun and Shradhdha at no point take center stage especially when it comes to dance sequences.
Remo D’souza gets the dancing so right in the movie that I would have given this movie full five stars, if the actors just danced and didn’t utter a word.
But dogs don’t fly and Vinnie just doesn’t shut up. Shradha Kapoor plays Vinnie whose enthusiasm put me to sleep. But it’s not all that bad. I applauded. At least once. When Vishnu tells her in sheer desperation- “control Vinnie.” I felt his pain.
Varun Dhawan is as earnest as it gets. The actor somehow lends credibility to poorly written characters like Suresh in ABCD 2. The lines are far from convincing. Varun’s acting is. And he has the biggest strength an actor must have these days- 8 pack abs. And boy he can dance. Full marks to the casting director.
The film suffers majorly from poor writing and poorer editing. The dance group has three months to prepare for the international championship; alas they spend three days that felt like three years to convince Prabhu Deva to be their choreographer. The film in the second half is as sluggish. You lose patience. You want them to snap it short and cut to the championship but the filmmaker has other plans. Before they take you to the climax, they have a free hop on hop off tour of Las Vegas, a dinner at Vegas’s best Indian restaurant, a Pooja Batra and her infectious smile. There is also the American contemporary dancer Lauren Gottlieb whose dance moves push the rating of this review a couple of notches higher!
In short if you are a DID/Jhalak Dikh La Ja/Just Dance fan. If you have broken your fingers, sending a thousand messages to save your favorite contestants on reality shows!! If Dharmesh, Punit, Cockroach, Raghav are familiar names who bring a big smile on your face, then you must watch ABCD 2.
WHAT THE RATINGS MEAN
5 stars: Loved it. (This could make to top ten movies you must watch before you die!) 4 stars: Liked it. Recommend it. (This will help you sound intellectual and give you stuff to add at water cooler conversations.) 3 stars: Didn’t hurt. Watch it once. 2 stars: It put me to sleep. Watch it if you are an insomniac or a newly wedded couple. Winks! 1 star: Do I even need to explain this?
This is my weekly review for Masala! Here- http://www.masala.com/movie-review-abcd-2-198312.html
Dil Dhadakne Do deals with a subject very close to my heart- live and let live as long as you are not making anyone miserable. So when people tell me that I should drink to ‘have fun’ and be less stuck up in life I want to slap them. I also want to hug all those nonreaders who are found with a Chetan Bhagat book after being mercilessly judged and trolled by pseudo intellectuals for not having flipped through a book all their lives. I want to hug every teenager who is reprimanded for ‘dating’ ‘too early’ in life. And most of all I want to hug and adopt all those young girls and boys who are constantly instructed by parents on how to eat/walk/talk/sleep or even sit.
But no matter how many times our parents let us down, we often turn to them for advice and guidance. That’s why Ayesha (Priyanka Chopra) despite being close to 30 and a successful entrepreneur seeks her mother’s (Neelam (Shefali Shah) help to discuss her marital problems. The mother is irritated. She tells her to make it work. Neelam has been nursing a broken marriage herself as she has never been financially independent and like her son Kabir points out had ‘nowhere’ to go to. In a couple of scenes later when Ayesha reassures Neelam that she need not worry about her daughter’s marriage, Neelam doesn’t pay much attention as she hurriedly steps down the rather dodgy steps of the Greek amphitheatre chasing her husband who is busy flirting with a foreigner in guise of ‘attending to his guests’. It is this vulnerability, such insecurity that’s so rarely explored in our Hindi films that I applaud Zoya for. Security; what a disturbingly powerful word is that!! Isn’t this security that we are constantly seeking in our jobs, relationships, in the way we look, the way we are?
And then there are love stories and our convenient notions about them. If the husband is giving you enough money to ‘shop’ (ha!)/not beating you up/sleeping around/ why would you even think about a divorce? Love and compatibility are the last things marriage should ever be based on.
Yash Chopra dealt with it in Silsila. Alas Jaya and Rekha, like how all pious dutiful Indian wives should, go back to their respective husbands. Jaya and Amitabh were not even in love. They got married because Jaya got pregnant with Shashi Kapoor’s kid. They shouldn’t have been together in the film. There was no love. Gosh how much that film irritated me.
And then in 2006, Karan Johar thankfully gave a rather realistic twist to Silsila. A lot of people couldn’t quite understand why Maya (Rani Mukherjee) would ever separate from a loving husband like Rishi (Abhishek Bachchan). Well very simple, she didn’t love him.
Zoya Akhtar misses this simplicity in DDD by eventually presenting Manav as an insensitive misogynist husband who would even hit his wife; reasons/justification enough for a divorce. But in their defense that’s how they conceived Manav’s character. Fair enough because we have such species in our society. But what was that women empowerment shit they were tripping on? Not that I am against it. I am as egalitarian as it gets, borderline feminist. But the last I checked subtlety was still an art!! Oh that scene of Sunny (Farhan Akhtar) and his ideas of women equality were just manipulative, contrived and so badly forced into the film’s narrative. Sunny accuses Manav’s definition of modernity and liberal to ‘allow’ his wife to work. Equality doesn’t seek permission he says. The scene doesn’t end there. Sunny applauds and prides in Ayesha’s successful venture that she started by selling her jewelry. Oh ho this –meri-Ayesha-mahaan was a bit much in the film.
Zoya has always done ensembles. And she does such justice to each and every character; writes them so well, directs them all even better. Lucky By Chance and ZNMD were still easy breezy because we had mostly familiar faces in supporting cast. In DDD she casts new faces and yet you remember each one of them so distinctly. With new faces it gets difficult to keep track of characters. Madhur Bhandarkar’s Heroine is a disastrous example of the same. DDD abounds with so many Soods, Nandas, Chadhdhas, Mehras and Khannas that if you didn’t look close you would mistake The Galata Towers for TV Tower in Pitampura! Ha! But each character is so well written that at no point you get confused who is who. More than Ayesha and Kabir, I came out of the theatre thinking about Divya if her tomboy make would ever help her score with boys or her little sister who gave her the best career advice- “Since you like sleeping, you could become a coma patient!” Full marks to Farhan Akhtar for penning down such brilliant moments and memorable dialogues in the film no matter how incoherent they seem with the film’s narrative. Allow me a moment to elaborate.
In Zoya’s first film, Luck By Chance, humor sprang from the story, like an integral, inseparable part of the film. The situations led to funny lines and not vice versa. “There is a lot of money riding on that waistline/She is a crocodile in a chiffon sari.” Such memorable lines. Or that scene at the film institute. The professor goes on and on about how a Hindi film hero needs to multitask; fight/dance/ride the horse and sundry. A female film student then naively asks; ‘Aur heroine sir?” In those three simple words Zoya exposes the sad reality of a male dominated industry/society in such subtle humor. Or even the credit roll of the film where a ferry, an astronaut and a worker all use the same toilet, subtly hinting at the problem of lack of toilets on sets.
In ZNMD or even DDD, the lines, no matter, how funny and intelligent, don’t seem one with the story. It almost feels like the lines or situations were thought first and scenes were written around them. And despite Zoya’s and Reema’s genius at integrating them well in the movie, one sees the disconnect.
The strength and the beauty of the film are in its characterization. Each one of them stays in their character, consistently. Kabir, unlike Hindi film heroes, never does anything too heroic like give a gem of an advice to her sister or stand up for her by locking horns with his patronizing father in public. Instead he goes and speaks to his father in private and gives him a piece of his mind when the father refuses to shelter a divorced daughter. Ranveer has played Kabir so well. He observes the family circus quietly. One can see the frustration on his face but he never goes out of character and explodes. Ayesha continues to be the kind hearted; Neelam stays a suppressed, frustrated wife and Kamal, the patriarch of a father throughout. They all remain in character until they drop the disastrous climax on us with such cheesy lines I thought I had devoured three McDonald burgers – “Dad can I rely on you? You are my life boat!” BURP!!!!!! Without revealing the end it was sad to see Mehras have a change of heart faster than that they changed cities on that trip.
And then I am thinking Luck By Chance did it so well, especially the ending. It was honest, unadulterated. Sans any melodrama. Sona Mishra slaps the opportunist ass Vikram so hard with so much sympathy, ‘isme tumhari galti nahi hain. Kuch log hote hi aise hain (selfish).”
(Watch the scene here-
And then the camera pans on her hailing a cab and on his big movie billboard. That just nails it so beautifully on their characters, their choices and their seeming success and equally seeming failures.
It’s sad that even filmmakers like Zoya and Reema are mindful of box office success. The filmmakers, who swore they would never ‘insert’ an item number for effect, have an unnecessary ‘Girls wanna swing’ or a ‘Gala Goriyan’ that comes so close to the heartbreaking scene of Neelam helplessly wolfing down a muffin to combat depression. Gosh gooseflesh. Shefali, bra-frigging-vo!!!
DDD addresses an important issue and packs some memorable performances. Anil, Shefali and Ranveer, take a bow!! It was part Bold and Beautiful, part Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki only a tad more realistic and believable. There are conspiring family members, giggling friends, fierce rivals, concerned well wishers all revolving around a dysfunctional family like faithful planets. The preachy dog voiced by Aamir Khan made it look like a painful three hour long episode of Satyamev Jayate. It was an interesting narrative tool that lost its charm when overdone.
But then there is Istanbul; Ah! That gorgeous Galata Tower witnessing young romance, that buzzing Taksim Square hosting the love birds on their first date, Hagia Sofia and its Roman-Latin historical charm; Istiklal street and those cycles zipping on Galata Bridge; perfect recipe for nostalgia and beauty.
The film made me smile at least SIX times!! And I sobbed, oops correction, howled to the point of embarrassment. I dodged glances on my way to the parking lot, looking down, fighting tears and finally broke down at the car wheel. Either it was a bad day or a bloody good film!! Or both!
fByLokesh 