Baabul

Director: Ravi Chopra

Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Hema Malini, Salman Khan, Rani Mukherjee, John Abraham, Aman Verma, Parmeet Sethi, Rajpal Yadav, Smita Jaykar, Avtar Gill, Gargi Patel, Sharat Saxena, Vaishnavi, Neeta Lulla, Om Puri

4/10

Pity poor Rravi Chopra. Here is a man who thought that he had the template for a heartwarming family blockbuster perfectly worked out. All he needed to do, he must have figured, was to corral the principal cast of his earlier megahit, Baghban, slather on the sentimentality, throw in an edifying social message, and, hey presto, he’d be up and away with yet another touching tale with Family Values coming out of its every pore.

Alas, the director’s calculations have gone horribly awry in Baabul. The ingredients are all here — the towering Amitabh, the luminous Hema, the inevitable karva chauth, and an admirable social message about the evil of letting widows remain, well, widows. We thought widow remarriage wasn’t such a big deal among India’s super-rich urban tribes, but evidently, Chopra thinks otherwise. What hobbles the movie, however, is not just its shrill sanctimoniousness. A weak story, a weaker script and some utterly shallow characterisation make sure that Baabul doesn’t even qualify as a halfway decent tearjerker.

By the time you have sat through the agonisingly slow first half where Salman Khan romances Rani Mukherjee and he and his father (Amitabh Bachchan) call each other “Buddy” until you want to scream, Salman’s death comes almost as a welcome relief. Ah, now we can get on with the story, you think, quite forgetting to shed copious tears over the tragedy.

The death is Amitabh’s cue to abandon his bluff, backslapping manner and mutate into a wise old patriarch whose only mission in life is to see his widowed daughter-in-law Rani remarried. Strangely, though Rani appears to be devastated by her loss, she soon lets Amitabh persuade her into marrying her childhood friend John Abraham. Now Rani is a fine actress, but even she seems a trifle confused as to how best to handle her sudden transformation from grief-stricken widow to serene bride-to-be.

The trouble with Baabul is that it simply does not pack in the necessary emotional wallop. And without that, this movie was never going to go anywhere.

Shuma Raha