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Movie Review: Gandhari (2026)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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Gandhari is what happens when someone tries to remake Kahaani without understanding what made Kahaani so special.

Gandhari writer Kanika Dhillon is no slouch at weaving together multiple plot threads, as she did in the Haseen Dillruba films. That’s what makes Gandhari‘s slapdash plot so shocking. Disjointed directing by Devashish Makhija makes the movie-watching experience all the more frustrating.

Gandhari marks Taapsee Pannu’s sixth project with Dhillon, having previously starred in those Haseen Dillruba films. This time, Pannu plays Bani, wife of Gokul (Ishwak Singh) and mother of 5-year-old Mishty (Myrah Shivan). While the family is on a trip, their train stops briefly in the town of Joypurra. A woman nabs Mishty while Bani is in the restroom and Gokul is buying snacks.

Bani chases the woman carrying Mishty across the platform, but she runs headfirst into a metal pole. The woman escapes, leaving Bani and Gokul to file a police report while also dealing with Bani’s head injury. The police are no help, and Bani’s concussion results in temporary blindness. The couple will have to find their missing daughter on their own.

Well, not entirely on their own. A federal government official named Kabir (Jatin Sarna) arrives with his assistant Sanjukta (Priti Shroff) to follow leads on a child trafficking outfit known as the Blackhole Gang, the history of which they explain in excruciating detail. Kabir and Sanjukta never interact with Bani, which is weird. It’s as if Nawazuddin Siddiqui’s Fed character in Kahaani never talked to Vidya Balan’s Vidya.

In this unfamiliar town, Bani just happens to run into her adoptive mother Jhuna Amba (Mita Vashisht) from back in her days as a child acrobat. Over the next month, Jhuna Amba secretly teaches Bani how to be a blind ninja assassin.

If that sounds stupid, it’s because it is.

All of this takes place in a town where seemingly everyone is involved in this child-trafficking ring. I don’t know much about gang finances, but employing so many people in a dangerous racket and buying their secrecy seems prohibitively expensive. Some retroactive continuity meant to connect Bani’s past to the Blackhole Gang that makes the plot even more ridiculous. It’s so bad, it’s actually funny.

Pannu put a lot of physical work into preparing for this role, and it’s a shame that the script lets her down. Action scenes are shot awkwardly and edited poorly, so nothing looks as good as it could have. The acting across the board is fine, given quality of the material.

Comparisons between Gandhari and Kahaani are fair, given how much the stories overlap. Both feature women looking for a lost family member in an unfamiliar city where identities are malleable. Balan’s character in Kahaani is underestimated because she is pregnant; Pannu’s is because she is blind and “a helpless mother.” Both of their searches reach their climax during a festival honoring a protective female deity: Durga in Kahaani, Chaumukhi Devi in Gandhari.

Yet Dhillon’s story lacks all the other things that Ghosh and his co-writers got right in Kahaani: magnificent world-building, ace character development, meaningful relationships, and twists that feel surprising but believable. Gandhari‘s world-building is terrible. Fight scenes and training montages take the place of character growth. Twists and secrets are used in quantity rather than quality.

Gandhari ends with Bollywood’s clearest indicator of a lack of narrative confidence: statistics. Three slides featuring data about the number of children trafficked in India are shown onscreen — as if the audience didn’t already realize that fictional stories draw inspiration from real life, and that, without the stats, we might feel there’s an acceptable number of children allowed to be trafficked. It undermines the emotional connections we were supposed to form with victims in the story.

The last of Gandhari‘s closing slides contains a quote so nonsensical that it provides the perfect ending to this awful film: “Behind every mother is a child…taken from a mother.” Exactly.

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Movie Review: Made in Korea (2026)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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The Netflix Original Tamil movie Made in Korea is data-driven filmmaking at its worst. This fish-out-of-water story is an assemblage of scenes lacking a soul.

Shenba (Priyanka Mohan) lives in a small village in Tamil Nadu so remote that she has to stand on the back of an elephant to get a cell signal. She grew up fascinated with tales of an Indian woman who traveled to South Korea and became a queen (based on the legend of Heo Hwang-ok). Despite her love for all things Korean, visiting the country of her dreams seems impossible.

Other people have their own dreams for Shenba. Her father wants her to take over the small family restaurant. Her secret boyfriend Mani (Rishikanth) wants to marry her, but only after he sorts out his financial problems. When Shenba’s family finds a groom for her, she and Mani flee to the city.

Miraculously, Mani secures a job for Shenba at a hotel in Seoul, promising to find work there himself. When Mani fails to board the plane to Korea with her, Shenba learns a horrible truth: Mani bought Shenba’s plane ticket with money her father dropped off for her, and he headed to Mumbai alone with the rest of the cash.

Freshly heartbroken in a city where she knows no one, Shenba discovers her hotel job was a scam. A handsome stranger named Heo Jun-jae (Si-hun Baek) takes pity on her and finds her a job as a caretaker for a sick, elderly woman, Yeon-ok (Park Hye-jin).

Up to this point, sophomore writer-director Ra Karthik is pretty thorough about establishing Shenba’s relationships with the people in her life — particularly those back home, and even her connection with Jun-jae makes sense. But from this point forward, every relationship is speed-run in order to check scenes off a Korean travelogue shot list (perhaps mandated by Netflix itself). Why things happen the way they do with the people they do makes no sense.

Shenba quickly discovers that Yeon-ok is faking her illness as a way to punish her son and daughter-in-law, with whom she lives. Yeon-ok threatens to accuse Shenba of stealing if she reveals her secret, but then immediately decides the young woman is her best friend. She drags Shenba to touristy spots around the city with Jun-jae in tow to document everything. ‘Cause, sure.

Then the woman open a restaurant together, and Shenba organizes a “K-pop” band out of the only other people she’s spoken to in Korea. I’ve never seen an idol group with a violinist, but okay.

There are all kinds of tropey K-drama moments, like the women hiring a part-timer to help with the restaurant, or the band shooting a K-pop-style music video. All we’re missing is a kimchi slap.

The whole thing feels hollow. Made in Korea was clearly designed by Netflix to fulfill two missions: capitalize on the popularity of Korean content in India and fill out the streamer’s thin South Indian Originals catalogue. The movie does so, but in a perfunctory way.

This movie isn’t born out of an Indian filmmaker’s own love for Korean pop culture. Ra Karthik said, “Personally, I had never watched a K-drama or listened to K-pop until I began working on Made In Korea.” It shows. If you’re familiar with K-dramas, there are a ton of ways to tell a fish-out-of-water story that leans into Korean TV-narrative styles, while showing character growth and exploring shared cultural traditions.

Made in Korea doesn’t do that. It hits a couple of K-culture tropes, shows some Instagram-worthy tourist spots, and calls it a day. Characters become friends, fight, and make up because the plot demands it, not because they have any reason to do so. It just feels empty.

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Movie Review: Costao (2025)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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Producer Sejal Shah makes an uneasy transition to the director’s chair with her feature debut Costao. Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays a principled customs officer in a biographical drama that takes a lot for granted.

Set in the 1990s in Goa, the story follows Costao Fernandes (Siddiqui). He takes his responsibilities as a customs agent seriously, risking his own well-being to investigate tips on illegal smuggling operations.

Goa’s most notorious smuggler is a businessman and aspiring politician named D’Mello (Kishore Kumar G). Costao’s informer (played by Ravi Shankar Jaiswal) lets the officer know that D’Mello is planning to bring in a massive amount of gold without paying duties on it.

A last-minute tip finds Costao staking out the smuggling operation alone and unarmed, with no hope for backup in the pre-cell-phone era. He chases D’Mello’s younger brother Peter (Hussain Dalal) and stops him near a small village. Peter pulls a knife and stabs Costao several times before the agent accidentally kills Peter in self-defense. Bleeding, Costao shows the villagers the gold in Peter’s car trunk and tells them to call the customs office. He runs before the cops arrive, since they’re all on D’Mello’s payroll.

When Costao finally turns himself in days later — after the regional head of customs offers him protection — he’s in big trouble. The gold was gone before customs agents arrived at the scene, and D’Mello has made sure that none of the villagers will testify to having seen it. All Costao has is his word as to what happened, but he fled a crime scene. Soon enough, he’s on trial for murder.

The case on which this fictional story is based set an important legal precedent for the protection of civil servants against retaliatory prosecution. It has all the makings of a gripping courtroom thriller. Yet Shah and screenwriters Bhavesh Mandalia and Meghna Srivastava treat the trial portions of the story as an afterthought rather than the point of the film.

Instead, they focus on Costao’s personal life, painting an unflattering portrait in the process. In an effort to depict him as a man who puts his principles first, they portray him as a terrible husband and absent father. He frequently fights with his wife Maria (Priya Bapat), ignoring her pleas to think about the danger he’s put her and their three children in and the upheaval he’s caused by forcing them to move into secure housing.

As Costao’s murder trial proceeds, he’s prohibited from fieldwork and assigned to desk duty. He quickly gets bored and negotiates a transfer to Mumbai, leaving his family behind. Even when he’s eventually cleared of charges, he doesn’t return to them.

Whether or not this is accurate to the man who inspired this story, one could understand some reputation laundering by the filmmaker in this kind of movie. Yet it doesn’t seem like Shah realizes how unflattering his portrayal of Costao is. Rather, the story justifies Costao’s neglect of his family by having the officer’s daughter serve as narrator, closing the film with her praising his heroism without mentioning the price she paid for it.

If Costao is a movie about a man torn between love and duty, we need to see that. If this is about a man whose freedom is threatened by state-sanctioned corruption, we need to see that, too. What we get is a film that expects the audience to side with the civil servant because of his job title, regardless of how much of a jerk he’s portrayed to be. It’s a real disappointment.

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Movie Review: Nadaaniyan (2025)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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Producer Karan Johar serves up fresh talent in the stalest of offerings — the youthful romantic comedy Nadaaniyan (“Innocence“).

Sridevi’s youngest daughter Khushi Kapoor plays rich girl Pia Jaisingh, who’s in a rough spot as she starts her senior year at an elite Delhi boarding school. Her friends Sahira (Aaliyah Qureishi) and Rhea (Apoorva Makhija) are mad at her for ignoring them all summer and failing to disclose that Sahira’s crush Ayaan (Dev Agasteya) was sending flirty text messages. Pia’s solution? Invent a fake boyfriend.

Thankfully, hunky Arjun Mehta (Ibrahim Ali Khan, son of Saif Ali Khan) just transferred to the school. His dad Sanjay (Jugal Hansraj) is a doctor, and his mom Nandini (Dia Mirza) teaches at the school, making him essentially destitute, compared to his well-heeled classmates. Arjun agrees to pose as Pia’s boyfriend in exchange for money.

If this sounds like a knock-off version of Johar’s 2012 directorial Student of the Year — another star-kid launch vehicle — that’s because it mostly is. More accurately, Nadaaniyan feels cobbled together from material deemed not good enough for SOTY, left rotting on a shelf for more than a decade. For example, the school’s principal Mrs. Braganza Malhotra (Archana Puran Singh, reviving her character from 1998’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai) comically misuses youthful slang, mistaking “LOL” as meaning “lots of love.” Arjun’s big plan to get rich after he spends a half-dozen years in law school and interning is to build an app.

It’s not just that the material feels dated. It feels like it was stitched together without a care for continuity or world-building. Arjun plans to get a college athletic scholarship for swimming, but we never see him compete as a swimmer. The whole plot revolves around his debate team captaincy. Does the school even have a swim team?

The only reason Arjun’s athleticism is even mentioned is as an excuse for Khan to show his abs, which is how he becomes debate team captain (no, I’m not joking). Focusing on Khan’s and Kapoor’s physiques isn’t in itself problematic, since they’re both twenty-four, but they are playing teenagers. The camera ogles both of them in swimwear in a scene that comes before Pia’s eighteenth birthday party. If they had been written as college students, it wouldn’t feel as gross.

Of course, Arjun’s fake relationship with Pia turns into something real, especially as he builds her confidence and encourages her to dream bigger than the stereotypical girl careers like fashion that her family is pushing for. Pia’s dysfunctional family includes mom Neelu (Mahima Chaudhry), dad Rajat (Suniel Shetty), and paternal grandfather Dhanraj (Barun Chanda). The Jaisingh men are salty that Neelu could never give them a son. Neelu beats herself up for it, Rajat cheats on her, and everyone makes Pia feel like nothing more than a pretty ornament. When tensions in the Jaisingh house finally boil over, it happens so explosively that it feels out of step with the frothy tone of the rest of the film.

With three films under her belt now, Kapoor still has much to learn, but she has potential. As in The Archies, she’s shown herself an attentive performer that plays well off of others. Khan’s future is less certain. He doesn’t feel fully engaged here, though director Shauna Gautam is also partially responsible for that. The weak screenplay by Riva Razdan Kapoor, Ishita Moitra, and Jehan Handa doesn’t give anyone much to work with.

The only people who come out of Nadaaniyan looking good are Mirza and Hansraj as Arjun’s parents. There’s a real tenderness in the way they deal with their angsty son and his friends. Too bad the movie wasn’t about them.

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Movie Review: LSD 2 – Love Sex aur Dhokha 2 (2024)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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Filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee has made some excellent movies. LSD 2: Love, Sex aur Dhokha 2 isn’t one of them.

Like Banerjee’s 2010 film Love, Sex aur Dhokha (“Love, Sex and Betrayal“), LSD 2 consists of three stories that slightly overlap, shot using camera equipment and effects that aren’t typical of feature filmmaking. In the sequel, those formats include things like a reality TV show, online meetings, and Twitch streaming.*

This style of storytelling lost me from the opening minute and never won me back.

LSD 2‘s first story centers around a reality show called “Truth or Dance” that is a combination of Big Brother and So You Think You Can Dance, but with a romantic angle (I’m not sure what the Indian equivalents of these shows are, if any). The film’s audience is dropped right into an episode of the show, complete with on-screen graphics and flashbacks to earlier episodes. It takes time to get used to the visual format, let alone make sense of what’s happening on the show.

In the fake show, contestants vie for points based on how compelling viewers find their stories. They’re encouraged to be on-camera as much as possible, whether they’re having sex with a fellow contestant or fighting with them. They periodically stand in front of a judging panel and either answer a question truthfully or perform a dance with their partner.

The show premise sounds absurd when written out. That’s a huge problem, considering that LSD 2 doesn’t merely tell a story about a fictitious reality show but tries to recreate the experience of watching a reality show. The “Truth or Dance” segment is shot using all the angles and techniques a competitive reality show does, and there are even cutaways to a YouTube channel where a content creator gives tips for audience members who can bet on the show’s results.

Such devotion to authentically recreating the viewing experience puts the “Truth or Dance” segment into an uneasy space where it feels less realistic than if it had been told in a more observational manner, a la a behind-the-scenes TV series like Sports Night. I could believe the segment more easily if it was about a ridiculous reality show rather than trying to convince me that I was watching a ridiculous reality show.

I say “ridiculous reality show” as a reality TV fan. By making “Truth or Dance” so absurd, Banerjee and co-writers Prateek Vats and Shubham seem to sneer at the very idea of reality shows. This attitude winds up influencing and overshadowing the character arc of the segment’s protagonist, a mercurial trans woman named Noor (Paritosh Tiwari).

One of the main characters in the second segment is also a trans woman. Kullu (Bonita Rajpurohit) is assaulted on her way home from her job working as a cleaner at a metro station. The details of the case present a problem for her employer, and her fickle boss Lovina (Swastika Mukherjee) deals with it though a series of Zoom meetings and video calls. The story overall is better than the first segment, but a fictional Zoom call can only be so exciting.

The final segment follows a teenage Twitch streamer who goes by the name “Game Paapi” (Abhinav Singh). In the middle of a stream, his feed is hacked by a convincing deep-fake video of him having gay sex. His insistence that the video is fake drives his popularity in a direction he doesn’t want, taking a toll on his mental state.

The performances overall are fine, but they are overshadowed and interrupted by the format. In every segment, scenes jump from YouTube videos to cable news to man-on-the-street footage to Zoom calls. It’s a commentary on the short-attention spans of the digital age, but with an important difference. In real life, I control what I’m watching and when I switch between mediums. LSD 2 feels more like turning over the TV remote to your fidgety father-in-law as he randomly flips between a Chicago Cubs game, She’s All That, and Road House, then asks you to explain what’s happening.

*I’m using the brand names whose formats are being mimicked (Twitch, Zoom, YouTube) for the sake of simplicity, but the movie invents fake brand names for all of them except Metaverse.

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Movie Review: Luv Ki Arrange Marriage (2024)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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Luv Ki Arrange Marriage (“Luv’s Arranged Marriage“) is a romantic comedy that has little to offer in the way of either romance or comedy.

The titular Luv (Sunny Singh) is the thuggish son of Prem Kumar (Annu Kapoor), a widowed Lothario with a reputation in their apartment colony. Luv chides his dad that a 55-year-old man shouldn’t be such a flirt, which is unintentionally funny since 55 isn’t exactly ancient and Kapoor is actually 68, anyway.

Father and son head to Bhopal with Luv’s aunt Prema (Kapoor in drag) and her husband Mishra (Mushtaq Khan) to meet a prospective bride for Luv named Ishika (Avneet Kaur). Ishika has rejected almost two dozen grooms so far, and she does the same with Luv. Both families say some hurtful things, and the Kumars leave in a huff.

Their exit is stymied as the city is engulfed in fiery political protests. With nowhere to go and a curfew in place, the Kumars return to Ishika’s spacious house and stay with her family for several days. Feelings between Luv and Ishika soften when he realizes that she’s avoiding marriage simply because she doesn’t want to abandon her widowed mother Supriya (Supriya Pathak).

Before Luv and Ishika can tell everyone they’ve reconsidered their engagement, Prem and Supriya announce their plans to marry. Instead of becoming husband and wife, Luv and Ishika are about to become brother and sister.

The film has a classic comedy premise, but there’s nothing fresh about the presentation. Flat jokes are delivered at maximum volume, and scenes are underscored with corny music and dated sound effects. Even with a relatively short two-hour runtime, the film devotes too much time to side characters like Rajpal Yadav’s spurned suitor Pyare and Paritosh Tripathi’s thief Jugnu.

It’s odd that Luv is the focal point of the title and the plot when he’s the least interesting character. The centering of his feelings is undeserved, especially when it comes at the expense of other characters. For example, when Luv does something selfish and Ishika gives him consequences, he gets a sad song montage about how deceitful Ishika is.

Singh’s low-energy performance does Luv no favors, though he’s more lively in the film’s dance numbers. Kaur puts in a solid effort as Ishika, and Pathak makes Supriya into a sympathetic figure. Kapoor and Yadav are comedy veterans and bring energy to their roles, but that’s not enough to recommend Luv Ki Arrange Marriage.

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Movie Review: Apurva (2023)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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A kidnapped woman fights for her life in the survival thriller Apurva, which is nowhere near as exciting as that summary makes it sound.

Apurva opens not with the title character — played by Tara Sutaria in what is clearly supposed to be her breakout, solo-heroine role — but with her kidnappers: a dull quartet of crude, violent thieves lead by Jugnu (Rajpal Yadav). Sukkha (Abhishek Banerjee) is second in command, with Balli (Sumit Gulati) and Chhota (Aaditya Gupta) rounding out the group. They beat people to death and have literal pissing contests out in the bleak Chambal desert. They’re too cliched to be scary, even though composer Ketan Sodha tries his best to make them seem so with some threatening background music.

After spending too much time with these dullards, we finally meet Apurva. She’s on a bus to Agra to surprise her fiance Sid (Dhairya Karwa) for his birthday. En route, Jugnu & Co kill the bus driver and rob the passengers. Sid calls during the robbery, and Sukkha answers, telling him they’re taking beautiful Apurva with them.

Just in case we doubted whether a man engaged to a woman who cares enough to surprise him for his birthday would actually want her back, we get a flashback and song montage detailing Apurva’s introduction to Sid and their bubbly courtship. With their mutual affection confirmed, we can rest assured that Apurva has a reason to live and that Sid will try to save her.

Thus Apurva endures one of the least-interesting movie kidnappings ever. She spends a good chunk of time knocked out after Chhota slaps her. At one point, an astrologer (Rakesh Chaturvedi Om) randomly wanders into the ruins of the village where they’re holding her, despite it being well off the road and miles from anyplace inhabited.

Things get even sillier when writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat — the filmmaker responsible for last year’s awful movie Hurdang — tries to tie the astrologer’s presence into the plot via a flashback with Sid that only highlights just how illogical his involvement is. Then again, that kind of fits in a movie where I repeatedly yelled at the main character to “just run!” when she was sitting there, waiting for her captors to find her.

Apurva is so insubstantial that there’s little chance for Sutaria to show off any heretofore unseen acting chops. She spends much of the film slowly moving barefoot through the ruins or yelling while lifting heavy objects, despite the fact that there’s nothing around to muffle sounds and her captors would obviously hear her. The thieves are a bunch of hapless jackasses, and Sid isn’t present enough for Karwa to have an impact. If you want to watch a “woman in trouble” film, watch Anushka Sharma in NH10 instead.

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Movie Review: Adipurush (2023)

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1 Star (out of 4)

This is a review of the Hindi version of Adipurush streaming on Netflix.

Adipurush reaches for the stars and falls well short, resulting in a film that looks bad and feels slow.

I acknowledge that I am not the target audience for Adipurush. The film opens with an onscreen note explaining that it is a devotional work, with the Hindu faithful as the presumptive audience for this retelling of a portion of the epic Ramayana. I’m familiar with the tale of Sita’s abduction by Ravana and her rescue by Rama, but the version presented in Adipurush is told somewhat out of sequence, with the assumption that everyone watching already knows all the details about this story, as well as Hindu cosmology more generally. Also, all of the characters go by aliases in the film.

That said, my issues with Adipurush have to do with the film’s execution, and not a misunderstanding of the material.

Prabhas plays Raghava, a prince who lives in the jungle in exile with his wife Janaki (Kriti Sanon) and his brother Shesh (Sunny Singh). The demoness Shurpanakha (Tejaswini Pandit) is enamored of Raghava, but he spurns her. She returns to the kingdom of Lanka and convinces her brother Lankesh (Saif Ali Khan) — king of the demons and a giant with many heads — to kidnap Janaki. Lankesh succeeds through trickery, forcing Raghava to seek aid from a race of forest-dwelling ape-men called the Vanara in order to get Janaki back.

Stylistically, Adipurush is a mashup of Lord of the Rings, Baahubali, and the recent Planet of the Apes trilogy. Lanka and its castle look like Sauron’s fortress in Mordor, complete with trolls manning the gates. Fanciful elements like a swan boat call back to Baahubali. The Vanara look like they could be Caesar’s long-lost cousins.

But Adipurush doesn’t come close to matching the quality of the movies that serve as its inspiration. Writer-director Om Raut tries to execute his vision on such a grand scale that the visual effects can’t keep up. Instead of having dozens of creepy bats or specters that look cool, he opts for hundreds of bats and specters that look bad. Rather than ask his VFX team to animate hundreds of ape warriors with enough texture to look believable, he has them animate tens of thousands that look like low-budget cartoons.

The onscreen human actors don’t feel as though they are operating within a real physical environment, and practical effects are rarely used. There’s some kind of filter or post-production treatment done to Prabhas’s face that makes him look like a cartoon. It’s distracting because none of the other human actors are given such treatment (though it would be hard to tell with Shesh because Singh uses only one facial expression throughout the entire film).

Visual shortcomings might be overlooked if the story was told at a fast pace, but Raut loves slow motion. The characters often move in slow motion, giving the audience plenty of time to linger on the subpar visuals while being bored stiff. This pacing hinders what Prabhas can do with his performance. Same goes for Sanon, to a lesser degree. She does get a few good scenes with Khan, who takes advantage of the chance to play a larger-than-life villain and seems to enjoy himself.

Given that Adipurush presently ranks as one of the most expensive Indian movies of all time, the quality of the finished product is underwhelming. In order to execute his vision given whatever constraints he was working under, Raut would have been more successful making an animated movie. Better that than a live-action film that looks cartoonish.

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Movie Review: Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan (2023)

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1 Star (out of 4)

Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan (“Someone’s Brother, Someone’s Lover“) is strictly for Salman Khan fans — but even they might want to give this one a pass.

Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan (KKBKKJ, henceforth) is a remake of the 2014 Tamil film Veeram, which was a big enough box office success to prompt remakes in Telugu and Kannada as well. Khan plays Bhaijaan, the protector of a neighborhood in Delhi and adoptive brother to three younger guys whom he rescued from an orphanage fire when they were little kids.

The film is dense with references meant to signal to Khan’s hardcore fans. This includes nods to his earlier movies and famous roles as well as allusions to his personal life, such as Bhaijaan’s name (one of Khan’s many nicknames) and his bachelor status. Even Bhaijaan’s entry in which he is summoned by the whistles of his brothers and neighbors encourages Khan’s rowdiest fans to do the same upon seeing their hero for the first time.

Bhaijaan’s brothers are all in romantic relationships but don’t want to ask his permission to marry until they’ve found a partner for him as well. Enter Bhagya (Pooja Hegde, who is undeniably charming in this), a beautiful woman visiting Delhi from her home in Telangana. She is inexplicably smitten by Bhaijaan, and the brothers get to work trying to get them together. The film just ignores that Khan is 25 years older than Hedge.

Bhagya’s budding romance with Bhaijaan is interrupted by Mahavir (Vijender Singh), a crooked politician who wants to redevelop Bhaijaan’s neighborhood. But he’s not the only one who’s put the lovers in his crosshairs. In one of the more convoluted, nonsensical subplots I’ve ever seen, there’s a drug dealer named Nageshwar (Jagapathi Babu) who wants to kill Bhagya to get revenge on her brother Balakrishna (Venkatesh) for telling the cops to arrest Nageshwar’s dad who ran a coffee company whose trucks Nageshwar was secretly using to transport drugs, causing Nageshwar’s dad to have a heart attack and die.

KKBKKJ could’ve settled for being just dumb and harmless. But the filmmakers couldn’t resist making a couple of immature homophobic jokes. And Mahavir has a Black bodyguard who appears in one short scene solely so that Bhaijaan can say of Mahavir, “At least he’s not racist”–only for the camera to immediately cut to the bodyguard as monkey sound effects play. The movie clumsily acknowledges that racism exists, and then is super-racist itself!

The movie is also extremely violent, but it tries to seem less violent than it actually is. On three occasions, characters hallucinate being on the receiving end of brutality, including an entire family being shot to death in slow motion. Only after the gruesome sequences end are we shown that the events were not real, just imagined.

That outcome is certainly better for the characters who imagine them, but the audience is still subjected to witnessing the violence. While it may not be real, I’m not convinced that seeing such gory deaths is harmless. And we’re certainly not better off for it. If those violent scenes have no bearing on the plot, then why must they be there? Was there no other way to generate a spectacle besides watching people have their necks snapped? KKBKKJ is the last place to look for answers to such questions.

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Movie Review: IB71 (2023)

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1 Star (out of 4)

IB71 is a spy drama with no intrigue. Characters have access to so much information that there’s no sense of mystery, and obstacles are manufactured in silly ways. It’s a forgettable movie that feels designed to be forgotten.

Vidyut Jammwal chose IB71 to be his first film as a producer. He stars as an Indian spy named Dev. It’s late 1970, and Dev and his fellow intelligence officers are monitoring multiple threats. There’s unrest in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and Pakistan and China plan to use that as pretext to take over India’s North Eastern Region. To do so, Pakistan would have to fly its military planes over Indian airspace to reach East Pakistan — an action India is powerless to stop without a formal declaration of war.

However, Dev thinks they might be able to trick Pakistan into committing an act of war, thereby allowing India to close its airspace. The intelligence bureau knows that separatists in Kashmir plan to hijack a plane in order to draw international attention to their cause. If India can get the separatists to hijack a plane of the Indian government’s choosing — one full of Indian spies, including Dev — they can trick the hijackers into landing in Pakistan and pin the blame on their neighbor to the west.

This plan gets rolling very early in the film thanks to India’s spy network already having access to all the relevant information. When there’s actual spying to be done, it’s goofy. Dev and his partner Sangram (Suvrat Joshi) make it very obvious that they are tailing one of the prospective hijackers in a Kashmiri town that seems like it only has a couple dozen residents, yet the guy being followed never notices them. When a Pakistani spy named Sikander (Danny Sura) needs to report to his superiors, his phone is out of service. He drives for hours to report in person instead of just finding another working phone.

Jammwal is renowned martial artist, but IB71 only has two major fight scenes. One scene is shot in a hallway during a blackout, so it’s hard to see what’s happening. In the other, Dev and the other characters wear baggy winter garb that obscure their movements. Jammwal’s fight scenes are usually the highlight of his films, but these feel utilitarian.

If Jammwal opted to get into production to expand his body of work beyond action films, IB71 was a poor choice because it offers him little to do acting-wise, despite his being onscreen almost the whole time. Dev appears to have no connections to anyone outside of work. His relationship with his partner Sangram is the closest we get to anything resembling friendship. Unfortunately, Sangram’s wife is pregnant, which bodes about as well for Sangram’s survival odds as if he were two days from retirement. Yet even that relationship lacks emotional impact.

IB71 feels so flat because the only emotion that matters in this kind of pro-India historical film is uncritical patriotism. The same problem plagued Mission Majnu earlier this year, but the main character in that movie had a wife, which raised the stakes for him and created internal conflict. Dev has nothing to choose between, since his life revolves entirely around his job. If he died, would anyone besides his co-workers even notice?

On top of that, the film is so pro-India that there’s a total mismatch between the countries involved. There was never a chance that Pakistan was going to achieve its goals, what with its unreliable telephone network and inferior pop music (something Dev scolds a Pakistani soldier about while in disguise). With the outcome telegraphed from the beginning and no emotional hook to the story, there isn’t much reason to watch IB71.

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