Mubarakan turned in a fine opening weekend performance at the North American box office. During the weekend of July 28-30, 2017, the comedy earned $305,449 from 148 theaters ($2,064 average; adjusted average of $2,386 from 128 theaters*). While those numbers aren’t flashy, they’re still better than the opening weekend figures of two other 2017 releases with similar theatrical footprints: OK Jaanu ($211,660 from 136 theaters) and Half Girlfriend ($238,001 from 127 theaters).
Other Hindi movies still in theaters (until SRK’s Jab Harry Met Sejal boots them out on Friday):
Jagga Jasoos: Week 3; $19,246 from 31 theaters; $621 average; $853,806 total
Mom: Week 4; $8,645 from nine theaters; $961 average; $602,255 total
Munna Michael: Week 2; $5,835 from 17 theaters; $343 average; $103,887 total
*Bollywood Hungama frequently counts Canadian theaters twice in when they report figures for a film’s first few weeks of release. When possible, I verify theater counts at Box Office Mojo, but I use Bollywood Hungama as my primary source because they provide a comprehensive and consistent — if flawed — data set.
Even in movies about reincarnation, where the audience knows that the lead couple is fated to be together, we still have to want them to be together in the first place. Raabta (“Connection“) gets that part of the formula wrong, pairing a likable woman with an immature moron.
It’s hard to overstate just how awful Shiv (Sushant Singh Rajput) is as a main character. He’s an entitled boor who hits on every white woman he sees, assuming them to be easy and stupid. A new job in Budapest gives him plenty of opportunities to be an abominable lech.
Of course, when he meets a lovely Indian expat named Saira (Kriti Sanon), Shiv is immediately ready to settle down with her. The presumed inherent moral superiority of Saira’s race and national heritage make it okay for her to jump straight into bed with Shiv, while the flirtatious white women Shiv dates are depicted as disposable tramps.
Saira can’t explain the depth of her attraction to Shiv (and neither can the audience). She senses it has something to do with her vivid nightmares of drowning, and his sudden appearance in them. Shiv dismisses her suspicions, always eager to downplay her concerns and dictate the terms of their conversations.
But Saira’s not alone in suspecting a connection to the past. Debonair rich guy Zak (Neerja‘s Jim Sarbh) has seen visions of Saira as well, from an ancient time when they were once in love. They meet when Saira and Shiv agree to the dumbest possible test of their fidelity: hitting on other people at a party to see if they are as attracted to anyone else as they are to each other. Shiv promptly rips off his shirt and jumps in a pool with some blondes, and Saira flirts with Zak, who is as classy and mysterious as Shiv is tacky and vapid.
Genre convention holds that Zak will turn out to have sinister intentions that endanger Shiv’s and Saira’s preordained romance. The problem is that Zak is objectively better in every regard than Shiv. Yes, even after Zak kidnaps Saira. That’s how deplorable Shiv is.
Rajput does his character no favors, turning in the worst performance of his career. Besides being annoying in the present, Shiv’s past self — Jillan — talks in a Christian-Bale-as-Batman growl, augmented by bug-eyed twitching. The only redeeming quality either version has is a set of six-pack abs (which Zak also may have; we just don’t get to see).
Sanon’s brief career has been distinguished by capable performances in roles with zero agency. Much like Sanon’s character in her debut film, Heropanti, Saira has no control over her own body. Shiv and Zak push, pull, and grab her at will, arguing over which of them she “belongs” to.
Further reducing Saira to object status is that she’s socially isolated in a way the two men aren’t. Shiv has parents in India, and his best friend Radha (Varun Sharma) accompanies him to Budapest. Zak has dozens of paid servants and bodyguards and can turn out hundreds of guests to a party on short notice. Saira, on the other hand, works alone, was orphaned at age two, and sees her boyfriend driven off by Shiv in the span of ten minutes. She has no connections to anyone, making it easier for the two men to do with her as they please.
If there is any bright spot in Raabta, it is Jim Sarbh. He takes a role that could have easily become cartoonish and makes Zak unhinged but understandable. Zak wants Saira as fulfillment of an ancient promise but also because she’s the only other person who shares his belief that the past is repeating itself. Shiv refuses to entertain Saira’s reincarnation story, belittling her as crazy despite the fact that she’s correct — yet another knock against these star-crossed lovers.
Sarbh’s cool charisma starkly contrasts Rajput’s over-the-top antics. It’s time for filmmakers to shift Sarbh from the compelling villain slot into leading man roles (and maybe consider demoting Rajput).
The biggest star in Raabta is Deepika Padukone, who performs an unenthusiastic item number for the title track. She sways and walks the runway, and that’s about it. I hope she got a ton of money for doing next to nothing, if only to serve as a cautionary tale for filmmakers considering such transparent casting stunts.
The new comedy Mubarakan — which brings Anil Kapoor and his nephew Arjun together onscreen for the first time — opens in Chicago area theaters on July 28, 2017.
Munna Michael gets a second week at MovieMax and the South Barrington 24. Mom carries over for a fourth week at the South Barrington 24 and Woodridge 18, which also holds over Jagga Jasoos.
Other Indian movies showing in the Chicago area this weekend:
Is it time to question Tiger Shroff’s potential to be star who can carry films internationally? Shroff’s fourth film, the dance flick Munna Michael, went all but unnoticed in its opening weekend in North America. From July 21-23, 2017, Munna Michael earned $64,756 from 73 theaters, averaging $887 per theater. His previous low opening weekend average was $1,360 for last year’s underrated superhero comedy A Flying Jatt, which opened in about the same number of theaters (79). Shroff’s combined total North American earnings for all four of his movies are $744,105.
On the plus side for Shroff, his upcoming projects are more traditional action films, including a sequel to his most successful movie, Baaghi (which earned $437,243 here), as well as a potentially disastrous Rambo remake. Then again, how many fans will be drawn in simply by the genre and not because Shroff’s name is on the marquee?
In its second weekend, Jagga Jasoos earned $117,736 from 106 theaters ($1,111 average), bringing its total to $788,777.
Mom closed out its third weekend with $27,297 from 22 theaters ($1,241 average), for total earnings of $579,077. Also in its third weekend of release, Guest Iin London earned $167 from three theaters ($56 average), bringing its total to $50,813.
One new Bollywood movie gets a limited release in the Chicago area on July 21, 2017. Munna Michael stars Tiger Shroff as a dancer who teaches a gangster (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) how to cut a rug.
Jagga Jasoos is an ambitious movie that I’d love to rate more highly. There were portions of the film that I liked very much, and I appreciate the world director Anurag Basu built and the way he told his story. Yet Jagga Jasoos is bloated with material and far too long.
Jagga Jasoos opens with a framing device featuring Katrina Kaif’s character Shruti as a children’s entertainer and author of a comic book series about her friend Jagga, a teenage detective. A troop of kids under her direction reenact scenes from the comics, before the action transitions to the world of the books, starting with Jagga’s childhood and his adoption by a man he calls TutiFuti (Saswata Chatterjee, best known to Bollywood fans for playing the unassuming assassin Bob Biswas in Kahaani).
TutiFuti coaches young Jagga to sing as a way to overcome the boy’s stutter, a device that enables Jagga Jasoos to be a traditional musical, with much of the plot and dialogue sung rather than spoken. The movie is punctuated by standalone tunes to accompany dance numbers and montages, with the best of those songs being the forlorn “Phir Wahi.”
TutiFuti is called away on a secret mission by a man known as Blackmail Sinha (Shaurab Shukla), leaving Jagga to grow up alone in a boarding school. By the time he reaches his teenage years, Jagga (now played by Ranbir Kapoor) has developed a knack for solving mysteries.
He stumbles onto an arms-smuggling caper with international implications, involving a journalist — Shruti — and possibly even TutiFuti. Shruti and Jagga travel to Africa to find TutiFuti and uncover the secret mission he’s been on for so many years.
The whimsy factor is high in Jagga Jasoos, not only because of all the singing but because of a visual style reminiscent of director Wes Anderson (whom Jagga Jasoos cinematographer Ravi Varman praises in the Scroll.in interview linked to below). Basu incorporates a number of comparatively low-tech special effects — such as deliberately using obvious stock footage of African animals or showing a plane flying over a map instead of actual land — for a fresh take on retro movie-making. The modern CGI effects that aim for realism and fall short draw more attention to themselves than effects that are intentionally outmoded.
Jagga Jasoos is at its best when Jagga and Shruti are together in his hometown along the border with Myanmar. The town and school have their own charms that help to create an immersive environment. When the duo leave town, they leave that quaintness behind for a plot that is grander in scale but less engrossing.
Removing geographical boundaries frees Basu to inject untold (and unnecessary) amounts of quirkiness into the film, particularly regarding the unseen criminal mastermind Bashir Alexander. By the time Jagga and Shruti board Bashir Alexander’s personal circus train, I had reached my limit.
Disney India would’ve been better off splitting its swan song into two films, a la Baahubali, rather than making one film to serve as both a setup for a hopeful sequel and a catch-all in case box office numbers deem a sequel unwarranted. Forcing Basu to cram as many ideas as possible into one film not only inflates the runtime beyond a reasonable limit, but it cuts short plot development in favor of visual spectacle. I’m still not sure what Blackmail Sinha’s goal was or who he was working for, and the framing device isn’t well explained either. Shruti’s students sing a song about not caring about the world’s troubles because they are protected by a “sign on the door,” but it’s unclear to what they refer.
For all its ambition and innovative ideas, Jagga Jasoos isn’t the movie — or movies — it could have been.
Things didn’t go so well for Jagga Jasoos in North America. From July 14-16, 2017, it earned $482,887 from 210 theaters ($2,299 average). That average barely puts it in the top half of Hindi films for the year here, just behind Tubelight, which was also considered a disappointment. Still, Jagga Jasoos‘s total was good enough to rank in 15th place at the overall US box office for the weekend, and its per-theater average was better than the averages of the movies ranked 8th-14th.
There are numerous reasons to explain why Jagga Jasoos wasn’t a blockbuster here, from the movie’s unique concept to it being a family oriented film opening during peak season for big-budget superhero flicks and animated fare. Jagga Jasoos‘s earnings fall within the expected parameters for recent films featuring its two stars. It earned more than Ranbir Kapoor’s Bombay Velvet in its first weekend but less than his Tamasha; it earned more than Katrina Kaif’s Fitoor but less than her Baar Baar Dekho.
Mom held up great in its second weekend in theaters, retaining nearly 40% of its opening weekend audience. It earned $99,535 from 63 theaters ($1,580 average), bringing its total to $493,245 — already nearly double its opening weekend total of $260,433.
Guest Iin London fared much worse, losing 85% of its opening weekend audience and taking in $4,494 from eight theaters ($562 average). Its total stands at $49,161.
Tubelight closed out its fourth weekend in theaters with earnings of just $200 — $138 from one Canadian theater and $62 from one theater in the US. It has total earnings of $1,575,849.
Disney India’s final production, Jagga Jasoos, opens in the Chicago area on July 14, 2017. Director Anurag Basu’s detective film reunites former lovers Ranbir Kapoor and Katrina Kaif onscreen.
Mom carries over for a second week at MovieMax Cinemas in Niles, River East 21, Cantera 17, Woodridge 18, and South Barrington 24, which also holds over Guest Iin London.
On Saturday night at 7 p.m., MovieMax hosts a live broadcast of the 2017 IIFA Awards.
Other Indian movies showing in the Chicago area over the weekend:
Both of the weekend’s new Hindi releases did well in North America relative to the size of their theatrical footprints. From July 7-9, 2017, Mom earned $260,433 from 94 theaters ($2,771 average; adjusted average of $3,339 from 78 theaters*). For context, that’s the twelfth highest opening weekend theater count for a Bollywood film in North America for the year, but the 9th best average and tenth best opening weekend gross.
During the same period, Guest Iin London earned $29,378 from 30 theaters ($979 average; adjusted average of $1,175 from 25 theaters). That’s the same minuscule theater count as Dobaara: See Your Evil, yet Guest Iin London earned four times as much as the horror movie did in its opening weekend.
Other Indian movies still in North American theaters:
Tubelight: Week 3; $15,281 from 27 theaters; $566 average; $1,566,474 total
Hindi Medium: Week 8; $3,154 from one theater; $792,627 total
Baahubali 2: Week 11; $1,162 from one theater; $20,790,774 total
*Bollywood Hungama frequently counts Canadian theaters twice in when they report figures for a film’s first few weeks of release. When possible, I verify theater counts at Box Office Mojo, but I use Bollywood Hungama as my primary source because they provide a comprehensive and consistent — if flawed — data set.
In a vacuum, Mom is an engaging revenge thriller that fully utilizes its star’s considerable charisma. Yet the film’s very existence raises the question as to whether the genre has exhausted its ability to add to the conversation about rape.
Sridevi plays the titular mother, Devki, a secondary school teacher. She has a young daughter Priya with her husband, Anand (Adnan Siddiqui), who brought another daughter — 18-year-old Arya (Sajal Ali) — with him into the marriage. The strained relationship between stepmother and stepdaughter is exacerbated by the fact that Devki is Arya’s Biology teacher. When a fellow student, Mohit, texts Arya lewd material during class, Devki throws Mohit’s phone out the window.
Arya later rejects Mohit’s advances at a party, so he enlists his sleazy cousin Charles (Vikas Verma), security guard Baburam (Pitobash), and drug dealer Jagan (Abhimanyu Singh) to kidnap her. They gang rape Arya and leave her for dead in a ditch. Upon waking, Arya bitterly tells Devki that the men told her “Call your mom!” during the assault.
When the justice system inevitably fails to convict the men, Devki realizes that her relationship with Arya will be irretrievably broken unless she takes revenge upon them herself. She enlists a private detective named DK (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) to track down the rapists before the lead police officer on Arya’s case, Mathew (Akshaye Khanna), uncovers her scheme.
There’s a lot to like about Mom, chiefly Sridevi, who is most heartbreaking in moments when Devki futilely tries to connect with Arya. Ali, for her part, nails the moody teen role. First-time feature director Ravi Udyawar maximizes Sridevi’s legendary beauty in a number of strikingly composed shots. (Udyawar’s camera direction is less successful in a hard-to-follow chase scene.)
Debutant screenwriter Girish Kohli provides his actors with memorable dialogue, and Khanna and Nawazuddin Siddiqui deliver their lines with style. Adnan Siddiqui gives gravity to a role that requires him to stay in the background in order to keep Sridevi in the spotlight.
Things get tricky when considering whether we need another movie about avenging rape. I’ll concede that living in America my whole life has exposed me to many stories about this topic, both fictional and non-fictional. The Hollywood film The Accused brought the story of justice for a gang rape victim into the mainstream back in 1988. Until recently, many Hindi films treated the rape of a woman as nothing more than a catalyst to provoke a male hero into action. Real-life sexual assaults in India in the last several years have shifted the focus of fictional stories — such as 2016’s Pink — onto the victims themselves.
So while there is still a desire among Indian filmmakers and audiences to confront the horrors of rape, I’m not sure that Mom treads any new ground in doing so. There is a cliched shot of Arya in the shower following the rape, scrubbing her skin so hard that it bleeds. A man is raped in jail and is laughed at for it — as though male rape is less serious than female rape. There’s a belief that the perpetrators deserve punishment that damages their sexual organs, and also a belief that doing so will restore Arya to her former self, at least to some degree.
All of these ideas have been presented so often in movies that we’ve taken them for granted. But are these ideas actually valuable, or do they just feed off the sense of helplessness experienced by bystanders to rape, whether immediate or from afar? Too many films about rape function as a kind of call-to-action fantasy for someone other than the victim — only this fantasy requires someone to suffer in order to bring it to fruition.
Director Udyawar does the right thing by not showing the acts of sexual violence, focusing instead on the aftermath. It removes any chance of such violence being sensationalized or depicted as titillating. He also fairly assumes that the Indian justice system (like the American justice system) is rigged against rape victims. But other than establishing those benchmarks for future filmmakers, Mom covers a lot of familiar territory. It’s a well-made movie, but I’m not sure it’s a story I needed to see again.
