Dilwale

Cars, slap stick jokes and a very thin story line are the essential ingredients of a Rohit Shetty film. Dilwale from Rohit Shetty has all this, but the proportion is so unequal that the movie looks very dull in terms of entertainment. With melodrama and outdated romance and sentiments eating a large chunk of the whole film, Dilwale won’t even please the audience who enjoys the Golmaal style comedy of Rohit Shetty.

Raj and Veer are two brothers who are doing the business of modifying cars. The younger one Veer, falls in love with a girl Ishita he met and the movie basically reveals the problem in the happy culmination of this relationship because of the past of Veer’s brother Raj aka Kaali. What is that issue and how they solved this issue is what Dilwale talking about.

At one scene the character played by Pankaj Tripathi asks Kaali What are the odds of Meera (the character played by Kajol) coming to the same place they are living right now? While watching the film, the amount coincidences we see will surely make us ask the same question. Usually Shetty used to cover up such things using certain slapstick stupidity, but this time he took it seriously. Movie borrows a lot of moments from SRK’s past hits like DDLJ, K3G etc. and unlike those films this movie has zero depth. You might ask who cares about the depth in a Rohit Shetty film, but Dilwale doesn’t look like those usual Shetty films. It is almost like he wants to make an intense film, but his temptation to make it commercial has spoiled it all.

I liked the attitude and look of the SRK with beard while his flashback look at times reminded me of the Fan teaser. Actor struggles a bit in those emotional sequences (poor writing was also a reason). He was terrific in doing the action. Kajol was the only one in my opinion did the character without any hiccups (it wasn’t that challenging BTW). Varun Dhawan sort of overacts to get into the zone of his director. He looked a little low on energy. Kriti Sanon once again makes a poor choice to be part of a movie that doesn’t really focus on her acting potential.  Don’t know why they created Boman Irani’s character. Varun Sharma was just okay. Sanjay Mishra, Johnny Lever, Mukesh Tiwari and Pankaj Tripathi did their respective roles neatly.

As I said, Rohit Shetty messes it up in a confused treatment. The story wasn’t that great at all to show all this heroics and emotions. By reducing his typical style filled with skit humor, he fails in being entertaining. As always the frames are full of colors and he hasn’t even spared branded cars. Action choreography has improved to a better level (Michel Bay of low budget) but unfortunately you won’t remember those sequences as spectacular set pieces. Screenplay tries to look sophisticated through partial narration of past, but couldn’t do anything to add some sense to the ridiculous coincidences in the content. Cinematography was nice. As per the making video, the Gerua song was shot at original locations. But if you watch the song on big screen, because of DI or added visual effects it looks like a song they created inside a studio floor. Music from Pritam has the required feel. Anyone noticed Gopi Sunder version of Sagar Alias Jacky just before that first Varun Dhawan fight?

Dilwale disappoints very much as it severely lacks entertainment. It is neither that deep romantic film nor that full on fun film. It’s just a confused mix of that which looks very flawed at the end. Except for a few moments of heroics from SRK, there isn’t much to talk about the film once you leave the hall.