RAABTA (U/A)
Director: Dinesh Vijan
Cast: Sushant Singh Rajput, Kriti Sanon, Jim Sarbh, Rajkummar Rao
Running time: 155 minutes
If some of those spandexed lifeguards from Baywatch last week could have swum under water to spoon out the leads of Raabta, perhaps both the movies could have been saved from drowning. So much of this new Bollywood release happens under water, and that too across centuries, it would have been no surprise if Leo DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson bubbled up from somewhere in the middle of the dripping mayhem.
Haven’t you watched many a trashy Hindi film and wondered how such a project could be greenlit in the first place? How could the producer have agreed to roast such a turkey? Well, the answer might lie with a film like Raabta where a producer has turned director with a movie which shouldn’t obviously have been made in the first place.
Dinesh Vijan, who’s backed fine films like Love Aaj Kal, Cocktail and Badlapur, chooses to wield the megaphone for the first time with a reincarnation tale so blah that it is bound to rock you to sleep in the middle of the day. And if awake, that second half especially can be injurious to health.
Raabta starts on a fine note. There’s palpable chemistry between Sushant Singh Rajput and Kriti Sanon, playing Shiv and Saira, two hopelessly romantic people making Budapest look even better. He’s a banker and she’s a chocolatier and the two go tu-tu-main-main like they are straight out of an Imtiaz Ali film.
In fact, Saira doesn’t only talk like an Imtiaz heroine, Kriti seems to have been consciously styled like a Deepika Padukone from Love Aaj Kal or Tamasha. And while Sushant tries too hard at times, he’s also genuinely funny in some of the banter, and between the two of them the first hour of Raabta is watchable.
And then “dhumketu” strikes. Literally. On the pretext of a comet called Love Joy which passes by earth every 800 years, we are thrown back to some medieval age civilisation where everyone looks straight out of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, but they all speak in Hindi! There, Kriti is a princess and Sushant is a warrior and they hang from trees and jump from waterfalls and scare away CG tigers to pass time. Not to forget the unrecognisable Rajkummar Rao playing a 300-odd-year-old gyan guru.
Jim Sarbh, who was fantastic in Neerja as the hijacker and was seen in a cameo last week in A Death in the Gunj, is the villain in Raabta, both then and now. And man, he is miserably uncomfortable speaking Hindi, leading to hilarious consequences. When you can’t take the bad guy seriously, everything automatically falls apart and there’s nothing more damaging to a film than its period portion turning into a joke. No wonder the court ruled in favour of Raabta because it clearly can’t hold a sword or a spear to Magadheera.
There are two things that might be remembered from Raabta. One is Arijit Singh’s Ik vaari aa, which is really soulful and melodious, and the stunning — and original — Deepika Padukone sashaying around to a new Pritam version of his own Raabta track from Agent Vinod.
Those clips you can find on YouTube. For free. Save yourself from this catastrophe. Or by the time you are out of the theatre, you might find yourself as old as Rajkummar in the film.
