Once upon a time, on a summer day rendered special by an unexpected downpour, an expectant crowd waited at the cinema, popcorn in hand, drinks settled comfortably in slots on the seats. We knew that the film would be a new release, but we didn’t know what the film would be. We sat through a ten-minute eulogy of Jayalalithaa, featuring actor Vivek and an expat who appears to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Little did anyone expect that the advertisement would be the better film of the day...until the name of the movie flashed. Yamla Pagla Deewana 2 – going by the groans and the footfalls towards the exit, its tagline should be “It takes us four words to empty a theatre”.
Some of us, though, were not quite so privileged. Some of us were being paid to watch this. Judging by the noises made by a couple sitting behind me (whom I was careful not to turn and look at), some had paid for their privacy. One feels sorry for them, though – a Deol family production is hardly an aphrodisiac. And some people in the theatre were just plain intrepid. Or masochistic.
The title song, featuring the Deol brothers, and the man who produced them, in the garb of Beefeaters, says it all – this film will be set in London; it will have two generic heroines; it will have a chimpanzee of some sort; and it will make you want to blow your brains out. Of course, the film starts off somewhere in Scotland, complete with bagpipes, en route to Birmingham or London – the filmmakers don’t appear to be sure which. Before that, though, the song sent most of the remaining audience out.
And then, the film begins – a blue car scoots into view, and stops. Sunny Deol, in sardar costume, gets out, and asks, “Why, rabba?” Rabba and he have a special communication channel which involves a bell going off in his head.
A car full of girls stops by, and they offer him a lift; his car promptly starts again. This might be the most intelligent shot in a film that involves a fake baba (Dharmendra) whose mantra is “Yamla pagla deewana”, his fellow-conman son (Bobby Deol), a rich NRI businessman (Annu Kapoor), a painting, a chimpanzee, an eccentric who goes by ‘Dudeji’ (Anupam Kher) and his sidekicks (Johnny Lever and a generic woman).
It’s incredible that a film as asinine as this could stretch for two and a half hours. The story could have been told in a single sentence – an honest NRI who moonlights as a model for suicidal admakers has a crooked father and brother, who try to con a businessman and end up falling foul of a chimpanzee. Yes. Even the couple behind me gave up during the interval and left.