entertainment cine TALK VARUN DHAWAN OUT-SALMANS THE ORIGINAL

Now this is a film that reminds us how enjoyable frivolity in cinema can be, if packaged and executed expertly. When a 20-year-old film about identical twins caught up in endearing inanity is rebooted, we immediately get emotional about the old film which incidentally, was trashed on release. We even begin to treat Anu Malik’s pedestrian tunes in the original as classics. There is news for all nostalgia addicts. Judwaa

Judwaa 2

STARRING: Varun Dhawan, Jacqueline Fernandez, Tapsee Pannu, Anupam Kher

DIRECTOR: David Dhawan

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2 is not only a more engaging ode to inanity than the original, but Varun Dhawan even manages to outdistance Salman Khan’s considerable energy level in the original.

What works bigtime for this remake is its absolute honesty of intention. David Dhawan wants to entertain as he has been doing for decades. There is no socio-cultural political agenda (bar a super-dumb reference to Trump), no attempt to induce gravity. The point is the pointlessness.

The prattle and the preening is all so frenetic, we get no time to think. We just go with the flow. And glow with the sparkle that father-son Dhawan generate together.

Judwaa 2 is unwilling to let go even a stray moment of potential pleasure. The film’s obstinacy to win us over with a feast of fatuousness breaks our defences down after a while. It is the kind of massy rabble-rouser that we don’t see in mainstream cinema any more. We either have “realistic” romcoms set in small towns or wannabe Hollywood spectacles which go nowhere with their egoistic ambitions.

Judwaa 2, never embarrassed about its aspirations, aims to be a lowbrow entertainer. Nothing more, nothing less. And it succeeds in being just that from the first frame to last. Everyone on screen has a blast. The mood of an ongoing party slithers down to the audience, infecting us with a giggly sense of beholding guilty pleasures.

The film is lavishly mounted.

Cinematographer Ayananka Bose shoots London with the lip-smacking relish of a tourist who has been there,