Movie Review – Judwaa 2 by Suhel Johar

Judwaa 2 Is A Mindless and Disappointing Remake

 

It requires a special kind of talent to spoil the sequel to an already bad film Judwa, but David Dhawan does it effortlessly. Nobody can deny that David Dhawan was the king of comedy two decades back. But David Dhawan is still stuck somewhere in the 1990s, and it shows in the crude jokes in Judwaa 2. If he intends to make more films he should understand that there is a time span for the quality and relevance of a joke. A joke of certain type which worked 20 years has very less chances to work. Humour always needs to be fresh and innovative.

David’s first film with his son was Main Tera Hero which was an okay comedy in which he seemed to be in control of his strength. Of course, logic has never been the base of a David Dhawan film but in Judwaa 2, he goes overboard falsely assuming that anything goes in the name of providing entertainment. Sadly the humour in Judwaa 2 is so lame and outdated that most of it will hardly amuse you. One thing is clear now though that Varun Dhawan is finally doing what he was engineered to do - you know by hybridising Govinda and Salman Khan genes. But the experiment has failed and it would be better that Varun stays within his comfort zone and continue to be who is. Because with Varun it just doesn’t quite work as well.

Raja and Prem played by Varun Dhawan are conjoined twins who get separated when they are babies. Raja is born among the masses whereas Prem is brought up in a sophisticated environment. Raja turns out to be the hero types with six pack and Prem turns out to be suave and a gentleman. Enter their respective girlfriends, Jacqueline Fernandez and Tapsee Pannu, who dance with them around trees. Later the twins come to know about the villain who is in vengeance mode and thwart him.

Judwaa might have worked during its time owing to its time and the magic of the team that time. Whether it’s Salman or David in full form, or Karisma’s exuberance or Anu Malik’s foot tapping tracks. But in 2017, trying to forcibly feed the same stuff is just not worth it.  As a result the sequel is desparate and gets artificial. Judwaa 2 has gags straight from the 90's and more often than not they are not funny. The first half still has some jokes that work but the ones that do are repeated so many times that it completely kills the gag. Sad, but true.

I found it difficult to laugh. I know we aren’t supposed to take anything here seriously. Judwaa 2 is just as careless about people with speech impairments – so Raja’s friend has such a heavy lisp that you can’t understand what he is saying. There is also a mind doctor who suggests that a bipolar patient should kill himself. Its equal opportunity insensitivity but I feel like we should know better by now. These characters were problematic even in the 90s and now they seem doubly so

By failing to evolve with time David Dhawan suffocates Judwaa 2 with all the elements that make a bad film shoddy. The screenplay, written by Yunus Sajawal is juvenile and the dialogues penned by Sajid-Farhad are full of silly double meaning jokes and the film lacks smart one liners which is so essential for a comedy film. So the dialogues are one of the biggest drawback and do a lot of damage to the film. Ayananka Bose does a good job as the cinematographer of the film. The film could have been edited better by Ritesh Soni to make it more crisper. Sajid-Wajid, Anu Malik and Meet Bros have provided music for the film. Malik has reprised composed two of the songs from Judwaa, those being Oonchi Hai Building and Tan Tana Tan Tan Tan Tara.

Performancewise, Varun does a decent job, he works hard, and he is fun when he is onscreen but somehow he couldn’t crack this one. His look, his punch lines, his six pack show-off, everything gets on to the nerves this time. Simply because he is no Salman and this was a perfect Salman type of role. To make it worse for Varun is the fact that there is hardly any support for Varun and the character graphs of Raja and Prem are not very well differentiated.

The other actors have much smaller shoes to fill.  And they sort of pull it off. Jacqueline is not a bad Karisma substitute. Taapsee, like Rambha before her, just doesn’t have much to do.  Obviously, there can be no replacement for Bindu or Kadar Khan. To add more agony to the viewer, we have Rajpal Yadav who is given a very cliched role. He doesn’t even succeed even once in making us laugh. Sachin Khedekar, Prachi Desai Pavan Malhotra, Zakir Hussain and Anupam Kher, pass muster.

On the whole, Juswaa 2 is a massacre of your intellect. The best part of the film is the guest appearance of Salman Khan in the film and he draws the maximum claps in the film.