Johnson Thomas
Stellar performances fail to raise the pitch here
Film: Angrezi Medium
Cast: Irrfan Khan, Radhika Madan, Kareena Kapoor, Dimple Kapadia, Manu Rishi Chaddha, Deepak Dobriyal, Pankaj Tripathi, Ranvir Shorey, Kiku Sharda
Director: Homi Adajania
Rating: * * ½
Runtime: 150 mins
Dinesh Vijan and team Maddock Films attempt to reclaim the success of ‘Hindi Medium’ by presenting this sequel ‘Angrezi Medium’ directed by Homi Adajania instead of Saket Gokhale. The film has some wonderful performances and a riveting father-daughter-bonding track but the unwieldy length and the sloppily sub-plotted shenanigans drag it down to tedium.
The film has a dream cast and Adajania has corralled their craft with superb control - every performer gives off their best, yet the scripting is so lazy, largely devoid of humor that the narrative is unable to make much of that benefit. The writing and situations are hackneyed – even though most of the characters in the film have clearly defined roles to play. Champak Bansal (Irrfan) a typical, simple, small-town owner of a Ghasitaram sweet shop in Udaipur, who has a running war of words with his cousin Gopi (Deepak Dobriyal) who claims his own shop as the original one, is a widower with a teenage daughter Tarika(Radhika Madan) who aims to go to England for her undergraduate studies. A reluctant Champak eventually gives in to his darling daughter’s dream even though he has to put his very livelihood and heritage up for sale.
The build-up to the point where Champak agrees to let Tarika go to London in case she scores 90% in her finals, is wonderfully woven and riveting. Thereafter the narrative goes into hallucinatory mode attempting slapstick and whatnot to shore-up the laughs. But the tiresome, ridiculous situations that the bumbling Twosome Champak and Gopi get into, are not exactly funny. The manner in which they mess up their immigration question at the airport first time round is downright foolish. The second time round they make it through as Pakistanis, bump into an undercover cop (Kareena) and under bizarre coincidental circumstances become friends with her Mom (Dimple). Kiku Sharda as the go-to person for everything from ticketing, visas, hawala to illegal immigration and Pankaj Tripathi as his ‘wannabe-Arab’ counterpoint fail to rake up the laughs within their poorly conceived subplots. Even Ranvir Shorey as the Indian friend in London, a conman, is sorely wasted here.
The film wants to highlight the father’s love for his daughter and goes to extraordinary lengths to show us he can do anything to make his daughter’s dream come true. But there’s no reasoning with the script as it gets the duo to play dice, bet on cricket and eventually sell-off their brand-name to the ready-to-appropriate-it-at-whatever-cost Chandiram(Manu Rishi Chaddha). It felt as if the writer did not believe in his own storyline and concocted something way beyond what anyone could do in this situation. This fantastic exaggeration only belittles what came before it and makes the second half a rather unexciting watch. Nevertheless, this is Irrfan and Radhika Madan’s film. They mesh well as father-daughter and give off their best even while the script goes haywire. The supporting performers are also memorably distinctive here. Adajania fails to lighten up the narrative temper and his signature quirkiness doesn’t quite pay-off in the manner it did in his earlier films. If Adajania had the luxury of cutting down the length to a bearable limit this film would have been a richer and much more satisfying experience. The use of in-film branding (Ghasitaram) may have made this film much more economically viable but the unexpected Carona Virus pandemic is more than likely to take a chunk out of its expected profits
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