Can’t laugh or cry, just a pretty long sigh

It comes with a statutory warning — “No animal (sic) were harmed during the making of the film.” Grammar be damned! But what about the grammar of filmmaking? Raaj Shaandilyaa, who has directed and co-written the film, has scant respect for that too.

Shaandilyaa’s hero Vicky (Rajkummar Rao) is a mehendiwala and his heroine Vidya (Tripti Dimri) a doctor. That’s not to say that a doctor can’t or shouldn’t marry a mehendiwala, but we don’t see Vidya in any scene that establishes her professional identity. Shaandilyaa could have made her an astronaut and gotten away with it. All we see her doing is fooling her foolish parents (Rakesh Bedi and Archana Puran Singh) into saying yes to her marriage to her mehendiwala boyfriend and then obsessing over her suhaagraat video, the CD of which goes missing after a burglary at their home.

The story unfolds in Rishikesh, which we are duly informed at that point of time used to be in Uttar Pradesh, not Uttarakhand. That’s because the story is set in 1997. An eye for detail? Debatable, because what we hear next is Vidya telling Vicky, who crash-lands at her sagai with another man, that she couldn’t inform him about it as he had no mobile. Mobile phones in 1997 were out of reach for most Indians. It was the age of pagers. But, it seems, Shaandilyaa does not have time for such nitty-gritty.

A suicide attempt, a ‘half-murder’ and a ransom call later, the plot becomes more and more absurd. The CD falls into wrong hands. In fact, it exchanges too many wrong hands, including a ghost that leaps from the frames of Rajkummar’s earlier blockbuster ‘Stree’ franchise. Logic be damned? Yes, that too!

Talking of logic, it is baffling why a director would choose a holy town like Rishikesh and fill it with crooks, petty thieves and blackmailers. Guess what, it also has a chor market, modelled after the famous chor bazaar of Delhi.

Shaandilyaa’s sole aim is to make his viewers laugh. So, he packs the screenplay with not just funny characters like a police inspector (Vijay Raaz) who falls for a wannabe actress, Chanda (Mallika Sherawat), and Vicky’s grandfather (Tiku Talsania), but peppers the entire plot with punchlines. To give him credit, a few work, but most seem forced. And the antics of his bunch of caricature-ish characters add nothing to the storyline or the entertainment quotient. If anything, they make this over two-and-a-half-hour-long fare unbearable.

The only saving grace in this laugh-riot-gone-wrong is Rao. He has played the relatable, troubled small-town guy for the nth time, but manages to infuse subtle variations into his character and that makes an impact. Dimri looks pretty as usual, but even at the cost of repeating ourselves, we would say she neither looks like a doctor, nor behaves like one. For argument’s sake, there is no compulsion for a doctor to behave a certain way. True, but then a doctor would not raid the locker of her parents’ house, along with her husband, for a sum of Rs 2 lakh. What she finds inside the locker is another logic-defying twist, but staying on the topic of Dimri and her character, maybe like her director, she too forgot her character’s arc.

Mallika Sherawat is back on screen after a long time. But looking at her acting chops, we would prefer to miss her than see her on the big screen. In Shaandilyaa’s scheme of things, she is nothing but a prop that adds to the nostalgia factor. After all, she is so ’90s!

Another ’90s element is Vicky’s preachy monologue shaming the perpetrator, who organises mass weddings and records the couples’ suhaagraats. The ending is not well defined and a sequel is on the cards. Hopefully, this time, Shaandilyaa will add another warning — Vicky, Vidya and their video are injurious to mental health.