Film Review: Bheja Fry-2

Saturday night we went to watch Bheja Fry 2. My daughter’s quarterly exams had just got over and we were looking forward to unwind with some laughs. But the movie only lived up to its name literally and fried our brains. How many times has it happened that the success of a movie has prompted a film-maker to make a sequel, or a part 2, and has ended up spoiling the whole thing by overdoing it? It is not that Bheja Fry-1 was exceptionally good, but Vinay Pathak had made us laugh in that 2007 flick.

The start looks quite promising but ten minutes into the movie and everything starts to fall apart. The director starts so many things simultaneously but fails to hold on to anything at all. Kay Kay Menon is a fraudulent business tycoon squandering his father-in-law’s money much to his wife’s dismay. Kay Kay’s character looks promisingly villainous with his eyes darting across anything dressed skimpily in his vicinity. He is shown having an affair with his secretary, and perhaps on the verge of having another one with his best friend’s wife- Aditi Gowitrikar- obvious by the way they both look at each other in the first few scenes. But then Aditi vanishes from the film altogether, appearing only briefly here and there doing nothing at all. Kay Kay then stalks Minissha Lamba but lets her go when she says ‘I’m not that kind of a girl’. Villains would soon be out of business this way.

There isn’t much of a story, but income tax officer Vinay Pathak happens to win a holiday on a cruise on a reality show. The producer of this show is Kay Kay’s friend and Aditi’s husband, who persuades Kay Kay to join them on the cruise, who in turn agrees on learning that Minissha Lamba too would be on the cruise as a part of the show’s team. Suresh Menon, another income tax officer, and on Kay Kay’s trail for tax evasion follows him on the cruise. With everyone on the cruise, and Kay Kay confusing Pathak to be the income tax officer who’s after him, and Suresh Menon disguising himself to evade Pathak, the plot finally seems all set for some good comedy of errors but suddenly Kay Kay and Pathak fall overboard and reach a remote island full of jungles. Perhaps the financers fell short of funds for the cruise ship’s rental  The second half of the film is spent on this island with the two actors making a buffoonery of everything, including tackling a monkey to recover Kay Kay’s pants. The director probably thought of this scene with the primate so good that he notified the audience in the beginning of the movie, along with the credits, that this particular scene was shot in Indonesia. So? It might as well have been shot in Timbuktu, who cares? Then, out of the blue, they suddenly discover a fully-furnished house complete with electricity supply, a telephone and a radio set- in the middle of a jungle!! The owner of that house is another of the many unsolved mysteries of the movie.

There’s nothing much to write home about the performances. We fail to understand what Minissha Lamba is doing in the film. If she’s there for the glamour, she isn’t producing any. In fact she looks awful in heavy make-up. Bad looks cannot be hidden under tons of paint. And despite her surname and the pencil-sharp heels, she looks awkwardly short when she stands next to Kay Kay- as if he’s talking to her from first floor to ground floor. And even this singular piece of better-than-nothing glamour is entirely missing from most of the second half of the movie. Therefore the director, perhaps by the way of compensation, makes a foreign model run helter-skelter on the island’s beach in a flimsy bikini for a few minutes. This plastic-like girl is so thin that one would think that her legs were candle sticks and arms incense sticks. The saving grace of the film is a few comical lines by Vinay Pathak. Kay Kay has acted according to his abilities. Suresh Menon has been thoroughly wasted. The rest of the cast are so impact-less that I don’t remember them as I write now. Rajat Kapoor is terribly missed. (He was very good in BF-1). Don’t waste time and money on this one. Go and have Bhel-Puri at the road-side thela instead. It’d be more fun.