Tag Archives: Anil Kapoor

Movie Review: War 2 (2025)

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1.5 Stars (out of 4)

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It was always going to be hard for a sequel to reach the heights attained by War in 2019, but War 2 crashes hard.

Years after the original, India’s best soldier — well, one of India’s best, given that the War films are part of the Yash Raj Films Spy Universe of movies — Kabir (Hrithik Roshan) has left India’s R&AW spy agency and works as a mercenary. Kabir’s swoony intro in the original film is the stuff of legend, so how does he make his first appearance in the sequel?

By staring down a clunky-looking CGI wolf.

The scene somehow gets worse as Kabir faces off against a bunch of ninjas in a Japanese castle. Unlike Khalid’s (Tiger Shroff) tightly choreographed, dynamic opening fight scene in War, Kabir dodges swords in slow motion. He punches and chops dozens of helpless dopes with rapid edits between shots. There’s no sense of flow to the fight since we rarely see Kabir execute more than two moves in sequence.

Kabir’s assassination of a Japanese mob boss catches the eye of a syndicate known as Kali. Made up of wealthy representatives from India and its neighboring countries, the group wants to end democracy and take over the region — and they want Kabir to help them.

Of course this was all part of Kabir’s plan to infiltrate them, coordinated by his mentor from the original film Colonel Luthra (Ashutosh Rana). What they didn’t expect was that Kali would force Kabir to kill Luthra to prove his loyalty. Kabir does, just days after Luthra’s daughter Kavya (Kiara Advani) is awarded a medal from the Air Force for bravery as a combat pilot.

Colonel Vikrant Kaul (Anil Kapoor) takes over Luthra’s post as the head of R&AW. He grudgingly lets Kavya in on the hunt for Kabir, but he’s got an ace up his sleeve — a rogue soldier named Vikram (NTR Jr) who’s Kabir’s equal in skill and tenacity.

The Indian spies track Kabir to Spain, where he’s meeting his adopted teenage daughter Ruhi (Arista Mehta). The girl exists purely to call back to the first film and set up an action sequence. In grand Bollywood tradition, she is never mentioned again.

The Spain action sequence is inspired very, very heavily by Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Instead of Tom Cruise and Haley Atwell in a Fiat careening through the streets of Rome chased by Pom Klementieff in an armored vehicle, we get Kabir and Ruhi in a Mini Cooper pursued through Salamanca by Vikram in a Humvee. The duo’s little car bounces down a bunch of stairs and eventually winds up on top of a speeding train about to crash — another sequence from the same Mission: Impossible movie.

There are plenty more plot parallels with the first War movie to come, with twists, betrayals, and secret relationships from the past. Kabir has his requisite dance sequences with both Vikram and Kavya (undeniably the best parts of the film). The whole thing ends with a fight in an ice cave, just like the original War did.

War 2 collapses under the immense pressure on it to be new and fresh while also being the same as War. The absence of Siddharth Anand — who directed War and co-wrote both the screenplay and the story — from War 2 makes it clear just how responsible he was for the first film’s success. Aditya Chopra is again credited for creating the sequel’s story, Shridhar Raghavan returns as screenwriter, and Abbas Tyrewala is once more responsible for the writing the dialogues. The continuity they bring is evident, but there’s no life in the sequel.

The new kid in town is Ayan Mukerji in the director’s seat. He earned his spot by directing the big-budget supernatural action spectacle Brahmāstra Part One – Shiva, but that was a passion project of his own creation. Here he connects all the dots, but the film lacks sparks — except for those created when Vikram inexplicably competes in a Formula 1 auto race in a powerboat.

All of the actors are fine, but that’s it. They’re all better than this.

War 2 is just too silly for its own good. No one person is solely responsible for its failure. Rather, it’s the product of a bunch of talented people turning in subpar work on a project too expensive and high-profile to warrant anything less than their best.

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Movie Review: Fighter (2024)

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1.5 Stars (out of 4)

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Fighter is just what you’d imagine when you think of a Bollywood version of Top Gun. The predictable action flick about a reckless jet pilot is mostly fine until an aggressively patriotic climax that veers into jingoism.

Hrithik Roshan stars as Shamsher “Patty” Pathania, ace pilot among the Indian Air Force’s “Air Dragons” squadron. Fighter director Siddharth Anand also directed Roshan in the action flick War, the highlight of which was Roshan’s character’s epic entry scene. Anand tries to give Roshan a similar introduction in Fighter, but it feels derivative.

The Air Dragons team includes fellow jet pilots Taj (Karan Singh Grover) and Bash (Akshay Oberoi), and also helicopter pilots like Minal “Minni” Rathore (Deepika Padukone). All of the other male pilots are married or have facial hair, so obviously Minni and Patty will fall in love.

Commanding Officer Rakesh “Rocky” Jaisingh (Anil Kapoor) thinks Patty takes dangerous risks, but the force needs all the help they can get to combat a rising wave of terrorism in Kashmir (the film is set in 2018, before Article 370 was revoked). The squad’s training is interrupted when a terror blast takes out several buses full of Indian soldiers on their way to the region.

If you’ve seen either of the Top Gun movies, you can more or less guess where Fighter is going. The Air Dragons retaliate for the explosion, and Taj and Bash are shot down by Pakistan’s ace pilot: “Red Nose.” (They just had to give him a stupid call sign.) Rocky blames Patty, demoting him and shipping him off to be a flight instructor. But when a recovery mission goes sideways, Patty returns to (hopefully) save the day.

The story is serviceable enough. The actors generally give decent performances, despite Anand’s preference for heavy-handed sentimentality. Padukone and Roshan are at their best in a scene where Patty packs following his demotion, leaving not just the Air Dragons behind but Minni as well.

But Fighter is a movie that says one thing and does another. Characters speak broadly about the Indian public and the military fraternity at large, but every plot point is directly connected to Patty or Minni by either romantic or familial connections. Note that Patty only plots revenge against Pakistan for his dead fiancée — another helicopter pilot (he has a type) — not for any of the other Indian soldiers killed in action that he doesn’t know personally.

Patty states repeatedly that the Indian military has nothing against Pakistan as a country, only against terrorists working within its borders. But the movie immediately follows Patty’s speech with a scene of terrorist mastermind Azhar (Rishabh Sawhney) marching into the offices of the Pakistani military and giving orders. Multiple times, the Pakistani government is depicted to be collaborating with, or controlled by, terrorists.

Fighter‘s militant brand of patriotism takes an extreme turn in the climax (which is full of ambitious but silly stunts and corny closeups). Patty claims that India is the rightful owner of all of Kashmir, and he promises that soon Pakistan will be known as “India-Occupied Pakistan.” Ending what should have been a feel-good movie with what amounts to a declaration of war needlessly pushes this triumphant moment into a dark place.

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Movie Review: Animal (2023)

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0.5 Star (out of 4)

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Animal is so unintentionally funny that it almost veers into So Bad It’s Good territory. Almost. An excess of pointless, gory violence and an unrelenting mean streak overshadow the film’s wackier elements, making it simply So Bad.

Ranbir Kapoor plays Vijay, a man obsessed with his emotionally distant father Balbir (Anil Kapoor). Since childhood, Vijay has assumed that he knows what’s best for everyone. His eagerness to use violence to prove that gets him sent away from the family more than once, further straining the relationship between father and son.

After college, mullet-sporting Vijay woos his childhood sweetheart Geetanjali (Rashmika Mandanna) by extolling the virtue of alpha males and telling her, “You have a big pelvis. You can accommodate healthy babies.” That Geetanjali is impressed by this red pill nonsense is one of the funniest parts of the movie.

Years later, Vijay, Geetanjali, and their kids return from America after Balbir is shot in a failed assassination attempt. Vijay replaces his dad’s security team with relatives from the family’s ancestral village. In truth, Vijay has enlisted his cousins to help him take revenge on the people who attacked Balbir.

Though Animal ostensibly takes place in the real world, the story is sheer fantasy. We know this because the structures that shape our society are absent. There are no police in Animal, and barely any mention of politics or government. Vijay kills hundreds of people in a single, publicly accessible place, and there is no reaction to it, let alone consequences. As much as I loathe cinematic storytelling that relies on news footage, the fact that no one seems to notice all the dead people feels odd. Balbir’s steel factory generates unlimited funds for Vijay’s vengeance, unmanaged and almost entirely off camera.

I say almost entirely because Vijay gives a televised speech at the factory promising to slit the throats of those who hurt his dad. If only CNBC was really that interesting.

See, Animal can’t be the realized dream of alpha male culture in a world with laws. The leading man must be able to exercise his will freely. He writes the rules, and everyone needs to fall in line or die. There are plenty of Hindi films where the male lead is the arbiter of reality, though few present such a bloody version of manly id unleashed. Usually it’s just a few extrajudicial killings by a divinely sanctioned cop (a la Singham), not gory mass slaughter and terrorism.

To be fair to Vijay, a lot of his killing is done in self-defense. The sequence in which Vijay chops through dozens of assailants with an axe while his cousins sing about how a Jatt is kicking ass is pretty cool. The rest of the fight scenes are less compelling, apart from the almost orgasmic reactions some men have to hand-to-hand combat. To call it homoerotic undersells it.

None of the women in the movie have any agency. All of them are threatened or humiliated by men. Geetanjali’s marriage makes her utterly miserable.

The actors truly commit to their parts in this goofy movie. Vijay likes to talk about urination and underwear, and Ranbir Kapoor delivers the lines with a straight face. Bobby Deol shows up late in the film to chew scenery, which he does with gusto. Somehow, Shakti Kapoor of Gunda fame plays the movie’s voice of reason as one of Balbir’s long-time friends.

The thing about a So Bad It’s Good classic like Gunda is that it’s fun. The violence is broken up with lighter moments, like when Mithun Chakraborthy tosses an infant to a monkey. Animal is weird, but not fun. Everyone is unhappy, including the anti-hero main character, and there’s no sense that things will be better when the violence stops.

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Movie Review: Thank You for Coming (2023)

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2 Stars (out of 4)

Bhumi Pednekar showcases her ability to master any kind of material in the sex-positive comedy Thank You For Coming. Unfortunately, poor pacing and inconsistent world-building keep this progressive story from reaching its full potential.

Pednekar plays Kanika Kapoor, an energetic single woman in her early 30s with an unfulfilling sex life. The film opens with a recounting of all of the disappointing men she’s dated, from a selfish high school boyfriend to a much older professor (played by Anil Kapoor). After we receive all this background and are introduced to her gynecologist mom and conservative grandmother, we learn Kanika has decided to marry a well-to-do nerd named Jeevan (Pradhuman Singh). Better to be hitched and unsatisfied than alone and unsatisfied, she figures.

For some reason, all of Kanika’s exes are invited to the couple’s engagement party. After a drunken night, Kanika wakes up in her hotel room alone. The only thing she remembers is that she finally had her first orgasm, but she doesn’t know who was with her when it happened. She and her pals set out to find the mystery lover before the wedding takes place.

Kanika’s hotel room revelation marks the halfway point in the story, which is way too late in the proceedings, especially since the material that proceeds it is only okay. Besides a few funny moments from Kanika — made all the more entertaining by Pednekar’s committed delivery — there’s a lot of dialogue that isn’t particularly humorous or informative. Critical information that will be relevant later is said in passing rather than shown, so it hardly even registers as something that might be important to the story.

One strange choice by director Karan Boolani and writers Radhika Anand and Prashasti Singh is that they hardly feature Kanika’s cool and very movie-friendly job. A new acquaintance Rushi (Shehnaaz Gill, who is bubbly and fun in her role) says that she is a super fan of Kanika’s work as a food blogger. The only time we see Kanika actually working is in a single, brief scene where her friend’s teenage daughter Rabeya helps her take some food photos. That’s it.

Incorporating food into films would’ve been an easy way to provide visual interest in a movie prone to telling, not showing. Plus, one of the film’s themes is about Kanika accepting herself as she is, and being a popular food blogger would seem to be a pretty big endorsement of one’s self-worth. Instead, the movie reduces Kanika’s whole being down to her floundering sex life.

Thank You for Coming makes compelling points about the double standards held against women who pursue sexual satisfaction. It’s particularly effective in a subplot featuring Rabeya that calls back to Kanika’s own troubled high school romance and its effects on her reputation.

Still, there’s too much dull, inessential fluff in Thank You for Coming, keeping it from being the snappy comedy it should be. Pednekar is a delightful lead, but the story lets her down.

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Movie Review: Thar (2022)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

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A veteran cop’s boring beat is upended by three murders and the arrival of a stranger in the Western noir Thar. Rajasthan is the ideal setting for a Western, and the stunning scenery is highlighted beautifully.

Inspector Surekha Singh’s (Anil Kapoor) decades-long career has been uneventful. Stationed in the Rajasthani town of Munabao in 1985, there’s little in the way of crime, except for the occasional drug bust of smugglers bringing heroin across the border from Pakistan.

All that changes in a single day. A married couple is found shot dead in their home, their daughter’s dowry stolen. Another dead man is found hanging from a tree, an axe embedded in his chest. For the first time in their careers, Singh and his partner Bhure (Satish Kaushik) feel like real police. They figure drug runners are responsible for the deaths, as they set about investigating the connection between the victims.

At the same time, a taciturn stranger arrives in town. He reluctantly gives his name: Siddharth (Harshvarrdhan Kapoor). He’s looking for a few men to help him move some antiques back to Delhi. Men in Munabao routinely work jobs in the city for months at a time, so his request isn’t unusual. A woman named Chetna (Fatima Sana Shaikh) assures him that her husband Panna (Jitendra Joshi) and his friends will be back in a matter of days, and Siddharth agrees to wait.

After Panna — an arrogant misogynist — and his compatriots return, it becomes clear that Siddharth’s intentions are not good. His polite interactions with Cheta are at odds with his actions when he’s going about his business. The mystery at the heart of Thar is: why is Siddharth doing what he’s doing?

Keeping Siddharth’s agenda a secret for as long as the movie does de-prioritizes his character development, blunting the emotional impact when his motivations are finally revealed. That said, Harshvarrdhan Kapoor is great at being mysterious. Nonverbal communication plays a big part in Siddharth’s interactions with Chetna, and Shaikh and Kapoor play off one another exceedingly well.

Relationships play a huge part in Inspector Surekha’s life. He’s got a supportive wife, and Bhure is his best friend, not just his coworker. Writer-director Raj Singh Chaudhary and editor Aarti Bajaj make a point to emphasize how much Bhure means to Surekha. Anil Kapoor and Satish Kaushik are a delightful duo. And Jitendra Joshi is really, really good at playing the loathsome Panna.

The desert location in Thar is not only crucial for making the way the story plays out possible. It’s also absolutely stunning. Though geographically and botanically distinct from the American Southwest, the area in Rajasthan where Thar was filmed feels like the perfect place to shoot a Western. The rocky hills spotted with scrubby brush make an ideal setting for a shootout.

One cautionary note for squeamish viewers is that Thar is very gory — more so than it needs to be to make its point about the nature of the violence being committed. But no one can say the makeup department didn’t do their job, that’s for sure.

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Movie Review: AK vs AK (2020)

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3.5 Stars (out of 4)

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AK vs AK is the most novel Hindi film to release in 2020, but novelty is just part of its appeal. Director Vikramaditya Motwane’s meta take on the Indian film industry — and two members of it in particular — is smart, insightful, and a lot of fun.

The AKs of the title are Anil Kapoor and Anurag Kashyap, who play outlandish versions of themselves, as do other members of the Kapoor family. The story is fictional but trades on the participants’ real-life reputations and circumstances. AK vs AK‘s Anurag is a temperamental and self-important arthouse director who feels he deserves more acclaim, while Anil is an aging star who’s slow to accept that his biggest films are behind him.

Anil’s character seems further removed from the real person (no offense to Anurag), but he serves to highlight both the importance of the Bollywood star system and the refusal of many of the men within it to acknowledge the passage of time, insisting on playing college students into their fifties. The fact that Kapoor chose to play the character as he does in AK vs AK shows why he’s the model for aging gracefully in Bollywood.

The story opens with Anurag and Anil onstage for a question and answer session with film students. They trade barbs, bringing to the surface a simmering resentment from when Anurag was a young filmmaker and Anil turned down a role in one of his movies. Anil accidentally spills water on Anurag’s expensive shoes, and Anurag retaliates by throwing water in Anil’s face.

All of this is captured by a video camera operated by Yogita (Yogita Bihani), a filmmaker shadowing Anurag for a documentary project. Yogita helps Anurag concoct an audacious revenge plan to kidnap Anil’s daughter Sonam (playing herself) and film Anil’s search for her. Anurag believes this will cement his directorial genius by capturing Anil’s most realistic performance ever.

What follows is a nighttime chase, as Anil tries to find Sonam before sunrise, at which time the kidnappers who’ve nabbed Sonam have promised to kill her. A video of a tearful Sonam bound and gagged convinces Anil that Anurag is not joking. The two cruise around in Anil’s SUV along with Yogita, who documents the search.

The chase involves a stop at Anil’s house to put in a cursory appearance at his own birthday party to placate his suspicious family, who don’t know about the kidnapping. Anil and Anurag get in a fistfight and destroy a Christmas tree, but it’s somehow not even the funniest part of the sequence at the house. That honor goes to Anil’s son Harsh (playing himself), who is desperate to work with a director of Anurag’s caliber. Harsh acts out his pitch to play an action figure while Anil tries to get him to leave, ending with Harsh screaming about AK vs AK director Vikramaditya Motwane ruining his career when their movie Bhavesh Joshi Superhero flopped. It’s insidery, but hilarious.

Those familiar with the Hindi film industry will get more out of AK vs AK than those who aren’t. I’m sure I missed some references to films from earlier in Kapoor’s career. That said, the overall story is totally comprehensible for those who aren’t Bollywood fans. The way it’s shot — with long takes and clever camera angles that keep Yogita out of frame except for when she’s part of the story — is reason enough to watch it.

There’s also a great examination of the price of stardom. In his most vulnerable moments, Anil can’t get anyone to help him without first taking a selfie with them. Years of entertaining people onscreen isn’t enough for a cop or taxi driver to give Anil information without demanding an additional toll. Not only does he not get special treatment in his hour of need, he doesn’t even get the same courtesy one would afford a complete stranger.

Motwane walks a fine line, making sure the audience always knows how to react to a given scene. AK vs AK is funny when it’s supposed to funny and sad when it’s supposed to be sad. Even the uncomfortable moments where the audience is forced to consider whether something is funny or not clearly feel intentional. Motwane always makes great movies, and AK vs AK is no exception.

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Movie Review: Total Dhamaal (2019)

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1 Star (out of 4)

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The good thing about watching Total Dhamaal on DVD is that my DVD player has a 1.5x speed option. Sitting through this at normal speed would be unbearable.

Total Dhamaal is a reboot of the Dhamaal franchise that began over a decade ago. It features some of the same actors but has nothing to do with the earlier movies. It’s an unofficial adaptation of the 1963 Hollywood comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (Mad World henceforth), with disparate duos racing across the country in search of stolen loot.

The pilfered cash belongs to corrupt police commissioner Shamsher “Don” Singh (Boman Irani). Thieves Guddu (Ajay Devgn) and Johnny (Sanjay Mishra) brazenly steal Don’s money, only for their getaway driver Pintu (Manoj Pahwa) to run off with the suitcase full of cash himself.

After a series of interminable character introductions, Pintu is fatally injured in a plane crash in the middle of nowhere. He tells a bunch of motorists who come to check on him that he hid the money in a zoo hundreds of miles away. Those passersby include all the folks we met in the boring setup portion of the story: unhappily married couple Bindu (Madhuri Dixit Nene) and Avi (Anil Kapoor); good-for-nothing brothers Adi (Arshad Warsi) and Manav (Javed Jaffrey); and disgraced firefighters Lalaan (Riteish Deshmukh) and Jhingur (Pitobash Tripathy). Guddu and Johnny show up as well, but Pintu dies before confessing the exact location.

The duos hem and haw before agreeing that the first pair to find the money can keep it for themselves. Guddu and Johnny use trickery to get a head-start, but they run into Don and his sidekick Abbas (Vijay Patkar) along the way, who then join the pursuit as well.

There are some genuinely funny performances, which is not surprising given the caliber of the cast. Bindu’s withering stare when Avi’s “shortcut” gets them lost in a jungle is a highlight, as is the interplay between the crooked cops Don and Abbas. But director Indra Kumar’s poor storytelling gives his stars few opportunities to shine, weighing them down under a bloated plot and dull, repetitive jokes.

As obviously cribbed from Mad World as the film is, it’s baffling that Kumar and his writing team of Paritosh Painter, Ved Prakash, and Bunty Rathore didn’t use more of the original’s plot structure. In Mad World, the dying man’s revelation about the hidden money is the film’s opening scene, and the characters involved in the race are developed on the road. In Total Dhamaal, the deathbed confession doesn’t happen until forty minutes have elapsed, after all of the main players have been introduced in boring vignettes from their regular lives. These sequences are pointless because there is zero character development in Total Dhamaal, and it means that the road race only takes up about a third of the total runtime. The final third takes place at a zoo run by Prachi (Esha Gupta) that’s in danger of being demolished. The zoo’s monkey security guard is played by Hollywood monkey legend Crystal.

In order to pay his veteran cast, Kumar cut costs elsewhere. There is a remarkable amount of CGI used in the movie, even in the car chases. Almost all of Total Dhamaal was shot inside a studio, giving the movie a lifeless, artificial quality. While some footage of actual animals was used during the zoo sequences, for safety’s sake, there’s obviously a lot of compositing at work.

Total Dhamaal‘s great sin is that it isn’t funny. Jokes are extremely simplistic — often consisting of a man being kicked in the behind or almost hit in the crotch — but they are dragged out forever, as if it were possible for the audience to have missed something. The jokes also follow a formula: Character A notices danger over Character B’s shoulder and warns Character B three times before B finally turns and sees the trouble approaching. Then they both scream. This formula repeats multiple times, and it never gets any more clever. Scenes jump from one character duo to the next without any attempt at graceful transitions.

Sonakshi Sinha’s cameo in the song “Mungda” is the best part of Total Dhamaal, so I’ll just embed the song video below and save you the trouble of watching the movie.

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Movie Review: Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (2019)

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3 Stars (out of 4)

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With Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (“How I Felt When I Saw That Girl“, ELKDTAL henceforth), debutant filmmaker Shelly Chopra Dhar set out to change how India thinks about LGBTQ people, both in terms of social acceptance and as an untapped well of cinematic storytelling possibilities. Her film is caring, thoughtful exploration of how a conservative family deals with a gay family member.

Sonam Kapoor Ahuja uses her star-power for good to play Sweety Chaudhary, a closeted lesbian from the Punjabi town of Moga. While on a trip to New Delhi, she ducks into a theater during play rehearsals to hide from a man we later learn is her brother, Babloo (Abhishek Duhan). Intrigued by Sweety’s good looks and her insightful critique of the awful play, its floundering writer, Sahil (Rajkummar Rao), helps her escape to a train station.

Sahil finds out where Sweety lives and heads to Moga under the pretext of running an acting workshop. There, a series of misunderstandings convince Sweety’s father Balbir (Anil Kapoor), her grandmother Gifty (Madhumalti Kapoor), and Sahil himself that Sweety is secretly in love with him.

Sweety explains to Sahil that she’s in love with a woman named Kuhu (Regina Cassandra). Babloo knows this and disapproves of his sister’s feelings, which is why he followed her to New Delhi and why she’d hidden from him in Sahil’s theater. Bereft of ideas for how to live a life true to herself, Sweety lets Sahil use his storytelling skills in a daring plan to win over her family and the town of Moga.

Director Shelly Chopra Dhar set herself the daunting task of making a movie that anyone could enjoy, but that would also open the minds of a particular segment of the audience. In an interview with The Telegraph, Chopra Dhar explains that her target audience was not progressive urbanites already accepting of LGBTQ people, but “people who’re genuinely not there”: those in smaller cities and towns in India who may have little personal exposure to gay people. So as not to risk scaring those people away, there is no same-sex kissing in ELKDTAL, only some affectionate hugging and hand-holding between Sweety and Kuhu — a choice consistent with the chaste way many mainstream Hindi films still depict straight romance.

Chopra Dhar also says in the interview that she had to consider ELKDTAL‘s setting when trying to reach her intended audience. Small-town folks might feel disconnected from an urban story, and a village setting could make the film seem too artsy and not commercial enough (which is why she made Balbir a rich factory owner). Although she wanted the serious message of acceptance to come through, she needed to relate to her audience in an uplifting way: “It’s not a dark and dingy film either. Why can’t it be a nice, bright film and be natural?”

ELKDTAL feels breezy and familiar, and its dramatic elements are balanced by two comic subplots. One involves the Chaudhary family staff — played by Seema Bhargava and Brijendra Kala, who is adorable in the film — betting on who Sweety will finally marry. Another features Juhi Chawla as Chatro, a goofy caterer with acting ambitions who catches Balbir’s eye. The tonal shifts between the comedy and drama elements aren’t seamless, but they never take the film off track.

In many ways, ELKDTAL‘s story is less about Sweety’s journey than how people react when she opens up to them. As the audience’s onscreen avatar, Sahil meets Sweety and decides she’s someone who deserves friendship and help, reinforcing the story’s message of judging someone by the content of their character. Sweety’s father, Balbir, already loves her, but he doesn’t see her for who she really is — in part because Sweety felt compelled to hide the truth from him. Balbir’s challenge is to accept what is, to him, a new facet of his daughter’s life, but also to see the way his own expectations for her made her life harder and less happy. It forces the audience to question whether we’ve let our own loved ones down by expecting them to be someone they’re not.

The downside to this narrative focus is that Sweety is acted upon more than she drives the action, but Kapoor Ahuja is fully engaged in every scene, her reactions always showing us how Sweety feels even when her character isn’t the center of attention. Same goes for Rao and Kapoor, whose love for his real-life daughter (Kapoor Ahuja) spills over into Balbir’s affection for Sweety. While ELKDTAL‘s laudable social goals are the perfect reason to start the movie, the film’s delightful performances make you want to see it through to the end.

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Movie Review: Fanney Khan (2018)

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1.5 Stars (out of 4)

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The corny family drama Fanney Khan lacks the self-awareness to notice its obvious thematic flaws.

Anil Kapoor’s title character is the only one that really matters in the film. Fanney traded in his life as a small-time band leader for a steady factory job following the birth of his daughter, Lata, whom he named after his favorite singer in the hopes that little Lata would one day achieve the stardom he never could himself.

Stardom proves hard to come by for Lata, however. As a teenager (played by Pihu Sand), Lata is repeatedly booed off stage at talent competitions by audiences and judges more interested in teasing her about her weight than listening to her sing. She finds her dad’s musical taste cheesy, but performing racy pop songs isn’t working for her either. Instead of allowing Lata to find her own way, the movie leaves it to Fanney to chart Lata’s course for her.

A chance encounter with the famous pop star Baby Singh (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan) inspires Fanney’s boldest plan for Lata’s success. He kidnaps Baby and holds her for ransom — not for the money his family desperately needs, but in exchange for getting Lata in the recording studio with Baby’s manager, Kakkad (Girish Kulkarni). Fanney recruits his jobless friend, Adhir (Rajkummar Rao) to keep watch over Baby, but Adhir’s crush on the star makes him an ineffective guard.

Fanney Khan might have succeeded as a pedestrian-yet-heartwarming family film were it not for a bizarre minor theme that alters the movie’s moral message in a way that debutant writer-director Atul Manjrekar appears not to have noticed.

The theme is first introduced when Lata plans her next live performance with her best friend, Rhea (Barbie Rajput, who is fantastic in her few scenes). When Rhea speculates that many top female stars slept with producers or other benefactors in order to become famous, Lata’s mother, Kavita (Divya Dutta), slowly enters the room, accompanied by music as somber as the expression on her face. She forbids the two girls from discussing the topic, even though were Rhea and Lata were both grossed out by the prospect and not actually considering it.

The same somber musical accompaniment reappears when Fanney asks Baby if she’d ever been pressured into sex for the sake of her career, when Kakkad is alone in a hotel room with Lata, and when Kavita sees Lata dressed in a (modest) one shoulder gown that Kavita nevertheless finds too revealing.

This repeated focus on women’s bodies and sexuality as they relate to fame is meant to convey the moral that women’s bodies are not tradeable commodities.

How, then, does director Manjrekar fail to notice the irony that his protagonist kidnaps a woman in order to trade her body for his own daughter’s success?

Fanney Khan is not a black comedy, and the sex-for-fame cautionary subplot isn’t explicitly juxtaposed against the main plot. Fanney is unquestionably a hero, slow-clapped by the very cops who come to arrest him as a way of praising his fatherly devotion.

Perhaps the point of the subplot is to convey that men may do what they like with women’s bodies, but women themselves may not treat their bodies as commodities. None of the men in the film face any repercussions for mistreating or intending to mistreat women’s bodies. Not Fanney or Adhir for kidnapping Baby, and not the studio head who wants Baby to have an “accidental” wardrobe malfunction in order to garner publicity. The character of a female recording engineer is invented specifically so that Kakkad can leer at her, thus making it appear as though Lata is in moral jeopardy when she’s alone in a room with him later. That Kavita doubts for a second whether Lata actually slept with Kakkad shows how little the film’s writers think of women’s ability to make their own moral judgements.

Fanney Khan lets down its main cast, who are all very good in the movie. Sand acquits herself well in her film debut, and she shares a nice mother-daughter rapport with Dutta. Rai Bachchan is natural in the role of a superstar, of course, and Rao is entertaining as always. Kapoor is flat-out terrific as the ultimate family man, making Fanney all the more endearing through his enthusiasm and cheerfulness. One way Kapoor could turn Fanney Khan into a positive is by taking Fanney’s band and backup dancers on the road, because they are a hoot.

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Movie Review: Race 3 (2018)

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1.5 Stars (out of 4)

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Director Remo D’Souza knows how to stage a big-screen spectacle, yet he seems overwhelmed by the baggage that comes with Race 3.

Most of that weight comes in the form of Salman Khan, whose stardom requires an outsized chunk of narrative space and screentime. Trying to give sufficient due to all of the other well-known cast members in the film — an admirable goal, for sure — expands the runtime beyond what the story can comfortably accommodate. Add to that the pressure of being bigger and bolder than the two previous movies in a series known for its outlandishness, and it’s simply too much.

Race 3 is a sequel in name only. Returning cast members Anil Kapoor and Jacqueline Fernandez play different characters than they did in Race 2, and the story takes place in a different narrative universe.

This time, Kapoor plays Shamsher Singh, an arms dealer living in exile in the Middle East after being falsely accused of illegal dealings back in India. He hopes to return home with the help of his stepson Sikander (Khan) and his twin children, Sanjana (Daisy Shah) and Suraj (Saqib Saleem). The family is assisted by Shamsher’s right-hand-man, Raghu (Sharat Saxena), and Sikander’s bodyguard and best friend, Yash (Bobby Deol).

Shamsher’s favoritism for Sikander has driven a wedge between the half-siblings over the course of decades, further inflamed when their mother’s will gives half of the family fortune to Sikander, forcing the twins to share the remaining half. When Yash’s new girlfriend Jessica (Jacqueline Fernandez) is revealed to have once romanced Sikander, the crew combusts.

The characters and their relationships are established via long scenes of dialogue that fall flat. Then, the Race story formula — with characters tricking one another, but planning ahead because they know their targets know they’re being tricked, etc. — kicks into full effect, necessitating even more boring dialogue. No individual character is particularly interesting, though the scheming twins had potential had D’Souza and franchise screenwriter Shiraz Ahmed pushed things in an edgier direction.

So much downtime allows one to imagine the Race 3 characters in other, potentially better movies. Shah and Saleem as creepy twins in a horror flick or sinister thriller. An action comedy starring Kapoor and Saxena, with Rajesh Sharma — who appears in Race 3 as Shamsher’s hometown friend — as their beleaguered younger sidekick. Fernandez starring in, well, anything else that utilizes her bubbly personality.

Fernandez and Shah feature in Race 3‘s most entertaining fight scene, flying through the air in a nightclub tussle. Shah has another fun bit when her long designer gown hampers her ability to kick her opponents — until she cuts a slit down the side with a dramatic flourish.

With an ace choreographer like D’Souza behind the camera, one expects mind-blowing dance numbers, yet Race 3‘s numbers are mostly forgettable (in part because of the need to accommodate Khan’s limited range of motion). The exception is “Selfish”, which stands out for the wrong reasons. Shah trained in aerial dance just for the number, yet the camera hardly captures her face, giving the impression that she used a body double, when I don’t think she did. There is also a group of backup dancers positioned so far behind the lead couple that they are often out of focus, which all but encourages the audience to ignore the lead couple in the foreground and instead strain to make out what’s happening behind them.

Action scenes throughout the film overuse slow-motion and are treated with a distracting effect that desaturates the image for a few seconds at a time. If randomly changing the image from color to black & white and back is the only way to hold an audience’s attention during a car chase, you’ve got big problems.

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