Cast: Varun Dhawan, Alia Bhatt, Siddharth Shukla
Music: Sachin-Jigar, Toshi Sabri
Director: Shashank Khaitan
Producer: Karan Johar
Writer: Shashank Khaitan
Varun Dhawan and Alia Bhatt once again hit the screen together with another entertainer ‘Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhaniya’. The two had previously paired up in their debut ‘Student Of The Year’.
Feisty Ambala girl, Kavya Pratap Singh, daughter of an automobile mechanic-turned-transporter, wants an expensive designer lehenga for her impending wedding.
Brash Delhi boy, Rakesh alias Humpty Sharma, whose dad owns a small college bookstore, craves the new car that his old man has been saving up for.
When the two severely cash-strapped youngsters meet, they strike an instant rapport and resort to means fair and foul to help each other out in the pursuit of happiness.
Sure enough, love happens while they go about chasing their material desires. And just before it is time to part, they kiss and make out.
That is only one half of Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania. It is reasonably watchable.
The next half unspools in Ambala and it is all over the place. After the interval, it becomes another story.
The title tells us that the film is yet another ‘Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge’ variant, so we can’t complain when the plot points start feeling the same, even if the details are different. So there’s your coming together of the girl (Alia) and boy (Varun Dhawan), initial smart-alecky backchat melting into passion.
Humpty (Varun Dhawan) and Kavya’s (Alia) turning up the heat makes Raj and Simran’s dalliance in those two decades-old mustard fields almost chaste. It makes the film feel real, and current. It tells us that time has passed, and things have changed, especially when it comes to showing young love on screen.
But the change is fleeting. In Bollywood, the more things change the more they stay the same. So there’s your stern ‘bauji’ (Ashutosh Rana), flanked by your ‘beeji’ and ‘veerji’ and company. From Dilli, the action shifts to a large homestead in Ambaley (if you are a true blue Punjabbi, you will not call it Ambala), which is all set to receive a suitable, ‘well-settled’ NRI groom (Sidharth Shukla), and act as a barrier to true love.
Debutant director Shashank Khaitan’s sure hand (and good ear) helps paper over a couple of improbable sequences in the first half, letting us in into the street-smart ways of Humpty and his besties, Poplu and Shonty (Sahil Vaid and Gaurav Pandey respectively, both excellent). But it deserts him when the romance kicks in, and the ‘dulha’ and the ‘dulhan’ and assorted characters are left dangling in a tiresome second half. So are we.
Johar and Khaitan do a decent work in reprising the Shah Rukh-Kajol starrer `DDLJ` and one can quite obviously see the resemblance between the two. If you ignore the weird end, the movie is a mass entertainer packed with romance, drama, action and comedy. It`s a typical larger-than-life Bollywood movie, the kind that Dharma Production is well known for and sure will attract young couples in love, even though it can not possibly leave an impact like `Dilwale…` did in the past.
Its a flat movie with some warm passages. Avoid if you have some other option to spend your weekend.
