Film: Honey Bee 2 Celebrations
Genre: Comedy
Director: Lal Jr (Jean Paul Lal)
Cast: Asif Ali, Bhavana, Lal,Sreenath Bhasi, Balu Varghese
Agreed, Jean Paul Lal’s debut Honey Bee (2013) wasn’t a classic cinematic experience, but the movie did have an innate charm. It packed a punch, sent the youth in a tizzy and did good business at the box office. The Lals (both father and son) must have, obviously, realised the potential of a sequel when they ventured to make Honey Bee 2 Celebrations.
And, it has a promising opening. The first 20 minutes are good enough, though littered with lots of booze and smoke. We keep waiting for the story to unfold, only to find there is none.
Seban (Asif Ali) and Angel (Bhavana) are rescued and the Punyalans decide to get them married. Soon, Mikael (Lal) sets out to Bengaluru to meet Seban’s parents (no, he isn’t an orphan in the sequel) played by Sreenivasan and Lena. The proposal is accepted and the stage is set for the wedding.
By then, we no longer care about the wedding, but about why, Lal, after all the great body of work he has done over the past years, bankrolled this project which doesn’t even have a basic storyline. The plot is stretched endlessly, causing it to fray.
While it was the comic sequences that made the prequel a favourite among the youth, in Honey Bee 2 Celebrations it can do nothing to salvage the movie.
Sreenath Bhasi, as Abu, does manage to stand out with his comic timings, but soon the funny antics degrade into cheap and distasteful one-liners.
By the interval, one is left to ponder over where the movie is headed. We see Seban and his dad engage in a war of words, but wonder for what they are fighting it out. Characters of no relevance come in and go out with little to do.
As for Asif Ali, the movie does nothing to his already-shaky career graph. The half-baked script offers him nothing much and in scenes where he gets emotional, the actor in him falls through. Bhavana has little to do, than look pretty, which she does. Sreenivasan, clad in garish suits and a perpetual frown on his face, looks confused and barely emotes.
Director Jean Paul Lal has proved his mettle with a debut film and he can do good work in the future too, only if he would focus more on the script, the staple of any movie.