Directed by Remo D’Souza, the man behind the ABCD movies, Be Happy, the new Amazon Prime Video film is an ultra generic dance+ motivation drama that almost felt like something Remo D’Souza developed from a scrapped fourth installment of his dance franchise. With the predictability and template structure of the story making things extremely cliched, this one felt like an injustice to the pairing of Inayat Verma and Abhishek Bachchan, who were so good in Anurag Basu’s cheerful black comedy, Ludo.
Shiv Rastogi, a single father who works in a bank, and his daughter Dhara are our main characters. They both live in Ootty with Dhara’s grandfather, Mr. Nadar. Dhara, who loved dancing, gets an opportunity to be a part of India’s biggest dancing show. Initially reluctant, Shiv eventually agrees to shift to Mumbai so that Dhara can fulfill her dream. What all happens after this is what we see in Be Happy.
There is a scene in the movie where Dhara realizes that she won’t be able to complete the competition due to certain issues, and she conveys her intention to quit to her father. There is an amazing smoothness with which child actor Inayat Verma performed this mature scene. This was perhaps the only scene or moment that stayed with me in the entire movie, as the rest of it felt like a regular mashup of these kinds of rise of the underdog dance stories. The reason why I am talking about this scene and the performance is because it felt like the movie never deserved a performer like Inayat. If the writing of the film had taken half the effort the little one took to make her character look sensible on screen, Be Happy would have at least made you slightly happy.
Story credit for the movie is given to Mr. Remo D’Souza, and what the movie really lacks is a proper story. There is no effort here to make the journey of the main character memorable for the audience. The rise of Dhara from being a regular student with a passion for dancing to becoming a nationwide sensation is shown in a very lazy, breezy way. The speed with which the movie was going would clearly give you an idea that something bad is going to happen. And when that bad event eventually happens, that one is also a cliche, and Remo D’Souza addresses that patch with a lot of hollow motivational speeches.
The dance part is the forte of Remo D’Souza, and much like his other films, the dance bits are mostly used to cover up the blandness of the script. Inayat Verma and Abhishek Bachchan are great actors. Luckily for Abhishek, he doesn’t have the burden of being a dancer in this movie, as the character is your usual shy, grumpy guy. The dance montages featuring Inayat clearly had the usage of doubles, and it was the wide-angle shots and the editing that were doing the work. Frankly, those sequences just don’t have the gist in them to make us root for the character. The placement of the songs is happening in the most outdated way possible.
Abhishek Bachchan, as the father of the girl, was fine in his role, and apart from the physical task of having to dress up in certain costumes for some scenes, Shiv Rastogi never felt like a challenging role. As the cool and intelligent daughter, Dhara, Inayat Verma delivers a charming performance, and like I already said, the mediocrity of a movie like this never really deserves the service of a talent like her. Nasser plays the Tamilian grandpa with that typical over-enthusiasm we see in grandfather characters. The character played by Nora Fatehi is paired opposite to Abhishek Bachchan, and maybe because of her unremarkable acting, Remo D’Souza decided not to proceed with that track after a point.
Most of the films associated with Remo D’Souza had the backdrop of dance, and almost all of them had very basic and lifted plots we had seen several times in many other films. Be Happy is also in the same zone in terms of creativity. While other movies at least had some stylized dance numbers for you to approach them as segments of DID, this one is a sentimental overdose that fails to engage you with its content.
If the writing of the film had taken half the effort Inayat Verma took to make her character look sensible on screen, Be Happy would have at least made you slightly happy.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
