Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2

Thanks to the only retained character from the original, Chhote Pandit, played by Rajpal Yadav, Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 has some occasional moments of laughter. Other than that, this Anees Bazmee sequel is just an assembled comedy that doesn’t seem to have any idea about the genre of the first part. Frankly, nobody expects anything spectacular in a movie with Anees Bazmee as director and Farhad Samji as one of the writers. But when you present this movie as a sequel to a well-remembered film, a lackluster career cannot be an excuse to lower the expectations.

Ruhaan meets Reet in Himachal, and he persuades her not to take the bus to Delhi so that they can have some fun time together. Reet agrees to this plan, and guess what? The bus on which Reet was supposed to go got crashed, and everyone in her family thought she had died. Since she knew that her sister loved her fiance, she decided to stay “dead” so that her sister’s marriage would happen. Reet’s plan to stay in an abandoned mansion with Ruhaan, where a ghost named Manjulika was put inside a room, doesn’t go the way she intended. And the movie is about what all happens in that mansion post the couple’s arrival.

The genre shift is the most annoying thing about Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2. The first movie, which was the remake of the classic Malayalam film Manichitrathazhu, was not a horror-comedy. It talked about mental health, and there was no ghost in it. It blended comedy, sentiments, and thrills in a very absorbing way. What you see in Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 is so damn loud and slapstick that for a second, you might wonder whether Bhool Bhulaiyaa was the remake of Raghava Lawrence’s Muni/Kanchana series. There is even a generic horror movie backstory here with the usual black magic and stuff.

The posters and promos might well have projected this film as a Karthik Aaryan movie, but if you look at who got to perform the most, it’s Tabu who has done the heavy lifting. She gets to play a dual role in the movie and adds a sense of seriousness to this lousy horror-comedy. Karthik Aaryan is very much in the Luv Ranjan zone of acting, and Kiara Advani is just there to look pretty in dazzling clothes. Rajpal Yadav, Sanjay Mishra, and Ashwini Kalsekar are the comic reliefs who actually provided some relief with their ability to pull off humor.

Anees Bazmee is someone who is known for making loud slapstick comedy, and he has pretty much dragged this movie into that zone. The story and screenplay by Aakash Kaushik are built around the dual role drama. The meeting of Ruhaan and Reet and the scenes around it clearly show how lazy the writing is. At one point, they even made Karthik Aaryan dance to Mere Dolna. The climax twist is straight out of an Abbas Mustan handbook of filmmaking, and interestingly that gives the movie some shape. Music was something great about the Akshay Kumar starrer, and this one is a complete disappointment in that aspect.

If you are okay with watching Anees Bazmee-style humor along with fat-shaming and word-twisting jokes from Farhad Samji’s arsenal, then Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 might feel like “nice” comedy. For someone who considers the first part and its original version as examples of comprehensive entertainers, this standalone sequel is a forgettable affair with occasional moments of giggle-worthy humor.