Cast : Ranbir Kapoor, Katrina Kaif, Saswata Chatterjee, Saurabh Shukla,Sayani Gupta, Adah Sharma and Nawazzudin Sidiqqui
Produced By – Sidhartha Roy Kapoor, Anurag Basu, Ranbir Kapoor
Music – Pritam
Length Of Movie – Two Hours +
At one point in the movie, Katrina, playing journo called Shruti, asks ” bore ho gaye kya??”
Most of the audience would reply: ” haanji! please stop with all the slap stick and get on with the story if you have one!”
That is the main problem with Jagga Jasoos. Lots of song and dance and action, without any plot what so ever! Further, it borrows literally from foreign comic figures like Tin Tin, but the semblance is lost on most Indians who have NOT been comic readers.
Second problem is, Sidharth Basu, the Director of J.J. seems to continue straight from where he left Ranbir in Barfi. ( Which actually was a much better movie). In Barfi, Ranbir couldn’t speak, in this he is speech impaired! In Barfi, he had only one parent who dies soon, in J.J. he is an orphan who lives his early days under the stair case of a Maternity home. Go figure the rest!
But the main problem with the movie is that Ranbir, who is no doubt a very talented actor and has put his heart and soul in the role, just does not pass off as a school boy! He is at least 20 years too old for it. We have watched him as a young man, finding his professional moorings in some excellent movies when he was new and very young. To watch him decades later as a school boy is really stretching our credulity too much!
One feels like telling him very earnestly ” Yeh umar nahi hai…mat kar galti pe galti!” (Just watch him as Ranbir Kapoor, his normal self, giving an interview about this movie, and then watch him making funny faces in J.J. pretending to be a school boy in shorts, and you are filled with remorse. ‘Why couldn’t the Director present him as the sauve, sophisticated, handsome young man he is, rather than this cartoon creature?)
If Ranbir himself does not jell in his role and convince, how would his (ex) lady love Katrina?! If he is a teenager, she as his romantic side kick shouldn’t be much over 20, right? You can see the trouble they have gone to, to make her look very young – putting specs on her, her attire etc. and you think back to the Kat who acted in her first movie with Ranbir – Ajab prem ki gazab kahani, which was made a good 9 years ago!!!
With these two implausible characters the thin story line is made up of a spy-adventure from a comic book, where the propagandist is looking for his lost father and inadvertently stumbles upon an illegal arms trade. An allusion to the Purulia arms drop that happened in Bengal long, long ago and rest of India has quite forgotten.
Sorry, much as we would like to, we cannot like this movie because it fails to engage us. Simple as that. When in the first 15 minutes you start getting this feeling, the rest is a torture and this movie is tortuously long. Please carry a strip of a good pain killer with you!
Rating:
