Jab Harry Met Sejal
Year: 2017
Director: Imtiaz Ali
Cast: Shahrukh Khan, Anushka Sharma

Director Imtiaz Ali and the lead actors Shahrukh Khan and Anushka Sharma are three people desperately needing a hit, following their recent rough patches at the box office. The promos promise a mushy romantic fare. How well does the film do?

What’s the plot?

An irate girl (Anushka Sharma) walks out of the airport after fighting with her fiancé over a lost engagement ring. She has vowed not to return to her Mumbai home without recovering the lost item! As she isn’t sure where she has dropped the precious ring on the just concluded multi-destination Europe tour, she catches her reluctant ex-tour guide to help her in the mission! The Mumbai-based Gujju girl and the EU expat Punjabi guide then go city-hopping, nay country-hopping, trying to locate and recover the ring. It is not too difficult to figure out that they start to fall for each other! How does the story end?

What’s hot?

·        Unless you are some tour operator who wants to show some exotic European locations to prospective clients, there is pretty much nothing to see in this film!

·        Okay, perhaps the first 20 minutes are bearable!

What’s not?

·        Imtiaz Ali repeats his ‘No ties attached couple frolicking on a road trip’- theme for the Nth time! Hope he understands the law of diminishing returns!

·        The whole germ of the film (Finding a lost ring in Europe!) is silly and unbelievable.

·        Such films thrive on character exploration, slow brewing of the unlikely romance and a chain of interesting episodes on the way. Here we practically don’t get to know anything about the lead characters till the last 20 minutes of the film. The romance never shows up except some vague wishy-washy dialogues and the things that happen on the way are plain ludicrous!

·        Shahrukh Khan is listless and Anushka Sharma (putting on an irritatingly inconsistent Gujju accent) is nothing but a caricature!

Verdict

It pains to see talents and millions of rupees go to waste in such superfluous star-based films! Rehashing old winning formulas is not going to work with tired old faces and minds.

Rating

2 stars