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Worst Bollywood Movies of 2022

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While plenty of the Hindi films that I reviewed in 2022 could be described as bland but inoffensive, there were still enough stinkers to warrant making a list of the biggest duds. Without further ado, here are my eight Worst Bollywood Movies of 2022.

Ram Setu makes the cut as an example of what happens to a potentially good film when you target it for the lowest common denominator. There’s lots of evidence that writer-director Abhishek Sharma knows what a better version of his Akshay Kumar adventure flick would have looked like, but Sharma takes the easy way out to avoid hassle.

Plan A Plan B and Cobalt Blue both suffer from awkward dialogue delivered poorly. The juvenile sex jokes of Plan A Plan B sound like they were from the screenplay’s first draft, while Cobalt Blue‘s characters speak as though they are reading lines from the novel from which the film was adapted.

I’m a little conflicted about putting Heropanti 2 on this list because it is 100% the most fun Hindi film of last year, but it’s also a complete mess. The plot makes no sense and neither do the characters, yet it’s a raucous and silly good time. I’ve re-watched the scene where Tara Sutaria shatters a mostly full bottle of Champagne by tossing it onto the ground rather than setting it on a table like a normal person god knows how many times.

Govinda Naam Mera is what happens when twists and attempts at audience misdirection go out of control, resulting in a muddled story populated by inscrutable characters.

The dingy thriller Cuttputlli winds up on the list for fetishizing violence against women and for being hypocritical about police brutality, which is only bad until the hero of the story wants revenge on a suspect. Then it’s okay. Also, 54-year-old Akshay Kumar plays a character who’s supposed to be 36.

Double XL is easily the biggest disappointment on the list (no pun intended). I had high hopes for this comedy starring Huma Qureshi and Sonakshi Sinha as a pair of women who overcome weight prejudice to pursue their dreams, but the screenplay feels like a rough draft that offers little insight about an important subject.

By the time the credits rolled on the final film on this list, I knew it was going to be my worst movie of the year. I had trouble imagining any other film that could come from such a morally corrupt place, and thankfully I was correct. My Worst Bollywood Movie of 2022 is Hurdang.

Hurdang stars Sunny Kaushal as a violent, privileged cheater whom the film positions as a poster-child victim of an affirmative action policy that seeks to redress caste discrimination. The movie contends that because some students might have to alter their paths to stable, desirable middle-class government jobs, it’s better to perpetuate a discriminatory system. In Hurdang, there’s no contradiction between the meritocracy that the film contends exists and a hero who steals exam answers. It’s a garbage movie that’s truly the worst of the worst of 2022.

Kathy’s Worst Bollywood Movies of 2022

  1. Hurdang – stream on Netflix
  2. Double XL – stream on Netflix
  3. Cuttputlli – stream on Hulu
  4. Govinda Naam Mera – stream on Hulu
  5. Heropanti 2 – stream on Amazon Prime
  6. Cobalt Blue – stream on Netflix
  7. Plan A Plan B – stream on Netflix
  8. Ram Setu – stream on Amazon Prime

Previous Worst Movies Lists

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Movie Review: Double XL (2022)

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0.5 Stars (out of 4)

Watch Double XL on Netflix

Double XL is a trainwreck. Good intentions can’t save a movie so utterly clueless.

Rajshri (Huma Qureshi) wants to be a sports broadcaster, and Saira (Sonakshi Sinha) aspires to be a fashion designer. Both face discrimination in their personal and professional lives for being overweight. A chance meeting convinces the two to travel to London for a week, working together to enhance their portfolios and build a lasting friendship.

It’s a simple story setup that in no way requires the forty minutes of annoying backstory that leads up to the two meeting. In fact, the setbacks that bring them together — Rajshri is denied the chance to audition for a job because of her weight, and Saira discovers her boyfriend is cheating on her with a thin woman — should have been used to introduce the main characters and establish them as underdogs.

Rather, much of the superfluous character development actually makes the characters less likeable. Both Rajshri and Saira yell at service workers or people who aren’t in decision-making roles about unfair policies, despite knowing that the person they are screaming at isn’t responsible or able to fix the situation. The solution to systemic discrimination is not bullying.

The story of Double XL feels like it was made with minimal effort and zero research. Rajshri and Saira are both 30 but act like they were frozen in time after they earned their bachelors degrees and only recently thawed out. In the intervening years, they appear to have learned nothing about career paths in their chosen fields and instead expect to be magically elevated to the top of their industries, just as soon as the powers that be can look past their weight.

For a movie about weight bias, it has very little insight to offer on the topic. When characters discuss the subject, it’s with a surface-level understanding that is belabored to death. Some problems that aren’t necessarily weight-related are made so for the sake of keeping the film on topic. The movie offers nothing new to viewers already attuned to weight bias, and it won’t do much to change to the minds of those who weren’t concerned or aware of the problem.

There’s nothing that Sinha and Qureshi — two actors I enjoy — can do performance-wise to save this film, and they get no help from the supporting cast. It’s further confounding that Qureshi co-produced Double XL and didn’t remedy its obvious shortcomings. I really wanted to like this film. I just couldn’t.

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