Film: Rock On 2
Cast; Farhan Akhtar, Shraddha Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Purab Kohli, Shashank Arora
Direction: ; Shujaat Saudagar
It's a little more than 5 years since the events of Rock On and we are guided by KD's (Purab Kohli) narration of events since. That's problem number one. KD continues to spell out things for us throughout the first half. Sometimes we see events as they happened and KD then narrates them too. It's like the worst form of sports commentary.
Aditya Shroff (Farhan Akhtar) is in Meghalaya taking care of a farm house and helping the people there. KD is still the man-child he was and Joe Mascarenhas (Arjun Rampal) has climbed up the financial ladder while Rampal is still trying climb up the syllabus of Acting 101. The new arc comes in the form of Jiah Sharma (Shraddha Kapoor), the progeny of a Hindustani giant, who creates music with a MacBook and literally works in a garage. The women from the older film reappear briefly in a bid to introduce some camaraderie that comes across as manufactured with every second of it falling flat – KD's jokes, Sakshi's (Prachi Desai) fake laugh. The whole thing goes on for too long and in circles. As Adi searches for some inner peace in the mountains of Meghalaya, we go in search of Rock On 2's disappearing emotional heft.
The death knell here is, shockingly, the music. In addition to being dull, it is also annoying to listen to Akhtar's crooning of songs that are bereft of life. The first film at least had such great music going for it that we were made to care for an ill-named band. We wanted this band that created a song like Sinbad the Sailor to gets its due on stage and beyond. We wanted these family men, and men who played the keyboard for Anu Malik to rediscover their younger years when they tried to create a name for themselves. In Rock On 2 though, nothing is at stake.
But credit where its due. It is good to see a Bollywood film that situates itself almost entirely in the North East - Meghalaya in Rock On 2. A rare feat in Bollywood that is notorious for its normalization of India as Mumbai or Delhi. But Rock On 2 has local actors (I think) and also has music from the parts. It is not politicized and neither is this presented as some kind of a statement.