Baby John

“Papa, I want a lal batti gaadi and people to salute me. I want to be a minister,” says a goon with a nose stud to his grotesque dad. He gets it on a platter. In the wake of last year’s Jawan and this year’s Pushpa, the fondly-held theory that south Indian filmmakers have cracked the box-office code, gets busted with writer-director Kalees’ remake of Atlee’s 2016 Tamil film Theri. The exhausting plot in two sentences: fearless IPS officer DCP Satya Verma (Varun Dhawan) is on a collision course when he takes on gruesomely repulsive gangster Babbar Sher (Jackie Shroff) and kills his criminal son. The same one who wanted a lal batti gaadi and maims, tortures and sets on fire, helpless young girls.

A boy of maybe five or six stands over his dead parents. They’re in a row of bodies on the ground in front of a high-rise, construction workers who died because of low-quality netting. The builder at fault calls the boy over (he’s from the northeast—migrant labour!), gives him 10 rupees and tells him to buy some chocolate. In the next scene, John (Varun Dhawan) crashes the builder’s party, decimates his goons, and sends the man crashing through a window to his death. One of the onlookers is the young boy, who takes a triumphant bite of chocolate.

You know a movie is on shaky grounds when you find yourself agreeing with a sidekick who scoffs at the hero’s swagger, ‘Kahe ka Bachchan? Machhar aaya hai. Massal daal.’ Truth be told, Varun Dhawan’s good egg energy makes it hard to buy him as an indomitable hulk single-handedly taking on a battalion of goons and serving justice without worrying about the consequences. The amount of loud music and dramatic mood (rain, thunder, fire) gone in to make the actor look formidable is telling enough of how unsuitable he’s for the job. Directed by his assistant Kalees, Baby John is a scene-to-scene remake of Atlee’s Tamil hit, Theri with a couple of inconsequential tweaks and a superstar cameo that didn’t do anything for Singham Again and doesn’t do anything for this one either. Even if you haven’t watched Theri, which is purely fan service for Vijay fans, you wouldn’t miss out on anything. There’s no dearth of potboilers recycling the same old masala over the decades.

Watching a mass actioner is a bit like watching West Indies play T20 cricket. When it comes off, there’s no better sight in sports. It’s all fireworks and fury, natural showmanship and musical rhythm. It makes no sense, yet the joy is real. But when it doesn’t come off, it can look like one giant Steve Smith mishit: ugly, awkward, strange, abnormal. Baby John is an example. Nothing aligns. The timing is woefully off, the star wattage is awry, the sound mix is all over the place, the action is unimaginative, it’s 164 minutes of dated narrative tropes, and the money shots don’t add up. That’s the thing about the genre: it’s boom or bust. It’s high-risk, high-reward, high-everything filmmaking. West Indies either chases down 250 or gets skittled out for 45 — there is seldom an in-between version.