I  have a confession to make. I went to watch this film blind — armed with only the information that it had the Deol brothers and Shreyas Talpade, who’s also directed the film. So when Sunny Deol (Jagawar Chaudhury), Bobby Deol (Vinay Sharma) and Shreyas (Arjun Singh) are shunned by their families and would-be families, I was intrigued.

Initially I thought someone had photographed them while they were dancing with a sexy Elli Avram at a mela in the opening item song (and I want to take a moment here, as someone who knows all the Sunny Deol steps from Yaara o yaara, that it was pretty epic seeing him dance again!). But by the time I was 30 minutes into the film and still hadn’t figured out why they were being shunned, I was ready to tear my hair out. And then it was revealed that they were falsely made poster boys of a vasectomy campaign. I waited for there to be more to it, because hello, people were being shunned here, but no, that was it.

What follows thereafter is a mile-a-minute pun marathon about nas bandi. Like ‘bina battery ka mobile’, ‘meter ka taar katwa diya’, ‘blackboard hai lekin chalk nahin hai’, ‘bulb fuse ho gaya’, ‘bandook kharaab ho gaya’. And they go on and on and on. I tried to remember that the film was addressing several important issues, like population control, gender equality etc, but in an effort to make it fun it became too frivolous. Couldn’t one of the three protagonists have said to their family, “even if we did it so what?!” And why did none of their loved ones believe them till they decided to get naked for their cause?

I won’t say some of parts the film weren’t funny. I did catch myself chuckling one or two times, mostly when it was Shreyas Talpade doing his over-the-top slapstick comedy, which he has proved he is pretty good at. And I was really excited every time Sunny Deol got angry — yes, he is a hot-head who rips out fences and dangles people off the roof when he loses it — but he never, unfortunately lets loose completely. And Sunny Deol trying to take selfies and pouting is cringeworthy.

Bobby Deol as the shy and awkward teacher is funny for the first two times he is on screen. He often forgets his sentences and has to refer to his textbook to finish them. It is funny the first two times, and then it is repeated again and again. The same thing happens with his “chemical dhamki” and “mathematic dhamki”. Someone should tell Shreyas that jokes work the first time only. When it is repeated it becomes annoying. The henpecked husband part would have worked too if Bobby’s wife wasn’t so loudly crass and Bobby so grossly unconvincing.

The film follows the hit-and-miss efforts of the trio as they try to fight against the misappropriation of their pictures without their knowledge, first at the local health centre level and then at the state level, when everything else fails they decide to do a full monty to sensationalise their protest, and though I am against body shaming my eyes shrivelled up just at the thought. Thankfully it is only Shreyas Talpade who gets semi-naked — for Sunny paaji taking off the pagri is enough — by which time the chief minister comes and admits that they had been wronged, and suddenly every family member and would-be family member is all welcoming and respectful once again.

Thankfully, at least the chief minister (played by Sachin Khedekar) talks about how vasectomy is not wrong and shouldn’t be perceived as a compromise of one’s manhood. Suddenly Sunny paaji is volunteering not just himself but the other two for vasectomy. I was waiting to see how the wives react to this news, because it wasn’t like they were made part of the decision this time either, but we moved straight to dancing Deols and end credit roll. Sigh. So much for gender equality.

Chandreyee Chatterjee