Way back in the mid-and-late-70s, Amitabh Bachchan was a One Man Film Industry, where he represented No. 1 to 10 in the list and only later came the other names. In those days, he was this larger than life personality- simmering with anger, bubbling with comedy and perpetually dishing out verbal and literal punches. Back then, the audiences did not seem to need a sensible plot; so smitten were they with this Big B image that they were just happy seeing him on the silver screen, doing his one man act.

Bbuddha Hoga Tera Baap is an ode to those Bachchan mania- years but it is also a spoof of all those Big B-flicks.  The writer-director has purposely kept the film’s tone over-the-top. While that works in the favour of this film, the threadbare, no-brainer script means that characters and scenes just pop in and out without much logic. So what we get is a shoddily patched up story featuring a committed cop (Sonu Sood), a ruthless crime-lord (Prakash Raj); a trigger-happy hit-man (Big B) and the paraphernalia of girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, wives and goons. The only purpose of the story is to ensure that Bachchan Sr. is given full scope to work his magic but it could have been written much better and much more intelligently.

The outrageous ode-cum-spoof works only thanks to the great man himself. As always, he is expected to shore up a weak plot with his bag of tricks – the songs, dances, fights and dialogues that have now become part of the film-lore.  But the challenge here is to do all that stuff while mocking at his own popular screen persona and his old age. The Star of the Millennium does that with aplomb. Smart, funny and stylish- he packs a punch in his performance. He once again shows that he can still carry an inept script on his (now much, much older!) shoulders to turn it into a fairly enjoyable Masala comic flick. As always, he is the main course and the others are like the side-dishes! Amazing, how he manages to do that decade after decade!