Varun Dhawan leads David Dhawan's latest madcap comedy.
Also starring Mrunal Thakur and Pooja Hegde, the film largely sees women as replaceable and disposable, appearing like a godforsaken remnant from a past era.
The jokes ring too bluntly to land.
There’s the unique terror of a certain Friday release. It’s the inevitable, thoroughly unwanted re-emergence of a ‘90s Bollywood comedy, rehashed with zero concessions for today’s temper. David Dhawan’s new film, Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai, is tiring to endure on more counts than you can muster patience for. It’s a sack of brain-dead gags that keep lashing at you, inconsiderate of its piddling humour and passing it off as one blustering joke after another. For the umpteen time, Varun Dhawan shows up as a man child who can never get a grip on situations while arrogating his inability onto others’ failings. You yearn for his character here, Jas, to take a hard look at the confrontations he’s avoiding, citing concern for his partners, when he’s basically duping them. Jas keeps waiving them, hoping for the right time and hence getting mired in progressively bigger crises.
Jas is headed for divorce when the film opens. He wants a baby. His wife of six years, Baani (Mrunal Thakur), doesn’t. Before the film lurches to this conflict, you’re subject to the courtship. He’s insistent, she dismissive. A wedding photographer, his gig turns out to be at the wedding of Baani’s sister. He has stumbled across Baani just once briefly and becomes besotted. He gives her an hour to decide to marry him and arranges a secret wedding ceremony the very night of properly meeting her. Recklessly, she agrees. We are told they had happy years beset with the sole hindrance of her opposing them becoming parents. A cut to present day gives Baani an opportunity to deliver a sincere rant in the court over focusing on career, which might be stymied by motherhood. The court allows the couple six months to make up their mind whether they would stay together or part, but Baani already urges Jas to move on.
Shifting to the UK, Jas falls for Preet (Pooja Hegde), whom he had earlier rescued on a rafting travail in Rishikesh. The embarrassing CGI-moulded schoolboy version of Varun Dhawan’s Jas pops up every now and then in flashbacks as remembrances of key lessons dispensed by teachers. Preet has a gun-toting brother, Randhawa (Jimmy Shergill), who’s really more ineffectual than he initially lets on. Even when his right-hand man floats apprehension regarding Jas, Randhawa mostly goes with whatever fabrication Jas tosses.
Above everything, David Dhawan is determined to dole his tone-deaf humour in spades. What might have been bearable in the ‘90s sticks out as a sore thumb in endless iterations of stupidity now. He desperately wants to position his lead as a righteous, innocent guy who only gets sucked into troublesome situations. Jas has no intention of tricking women. He’s only circumstantially flung into episodes that make him increasingly appear as manipulative and fraudulent. He means no harm. Dhawan has the audacity to even give Jas a climax where he passionately pleads to his integrity and dumps blame on everyone for being hypocrites. It’s the sly kind of characterisation that justifies problematic masculinity in a single, neat swipe.
As the film wore on, stubborn in Jas’ well-intentioned, mistaken conduct, I grew exhausted. Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai has no desire to interrogate its protagonist’s entitlement. The director and his lead gleefully carry on a delusional circus of male aggrandisement. The women simply shuffle between being slim versions of eye candy. They sashay in svelte avatars and are highly impressionable. Jas manages to fool even Randhawa who ostensibly has an empire. Basically, he’s a charmer who never intends malice. That his deeds often mislead his partners is only incidental. It’s bizarre how everyone keeps succumbing to Jas’ obvious misdirection, the litany of lies. He gets away with his cheating for a miraculously long span. Yes, plausibility is tough to negotiate and find in such films. But should you lower the bar for decency with clear double standards?
For some reason, Jas ends up with women who drink like a fish. Of course, he is the teetotaller. If he does drink, it’s under the influence of his lovers. There’s some thinly veiled gendered virtue signalling here which is too asinine to bother with. It’s just the tip of the iceberg. Consider the wearily familiar brand of humour, that toggles freely between fat-shaming, effeminacy and attempted rape. Oh, there’s also Mouni Roy as a fake mother, roped in simply for a dance number and as yet another form of eye candy. The director reassures that all these jabs are in a light vein, occasionally accented as a dream sequence. But any such entreaty falls flat given the routine insensitivity, the skewedness that favours the man at the centre. Jas might be humbled sporadically, but he’s acutely resistant to growing up. Varun Dhawan keeps prancing around like a hyper energetic bunny for the zillionth time here as well. Just to watch him cavort like a teen started giving me a headache well before intermission. Coming out of Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai, I was plain relieved to be no longer in the company of an insufferable philanderer.
