Bhaiaji Superhit Movie Review

One look at this film and you know that it has been hit by a tidal wave of production problems; withdrawal of finance, last minute replacement of actors and the rescheduling of shoots and locations. But a completed and released film has no excuses. This is a comedy about a movie director who has been kidnapped from his ‘B’ grade production house by a gangster and forced to work on a new movie about the hoodlum’s marriage.

The mobster, eponymously called 3D (Sunny Deol), and always larger than life when he administers mafia justice, hopes that the completed film will explain a few things to his estranged wife, Sapna (Preity Zinta), and help in a possible reconciliation with her. But marriage counselling via the big screen has its own problems, the chief of which is the use of actors to represent the separated husband and wife. When Sapna gets to know that her errant husband is producing a movie with an attractive actress called Mallika (Ameesha Patel), she turns up on the set, furious and ready to do battle once again.

The first half hour of ‘Bhaiaji Superhit’ is interesting, and has a few amusing sequences with two contemporary scene stealers of Hindi cinema, Pankaj Tripathi and Sanjay Mishra. Tripathi plays a builder who has failed to pay a large amount of money to 3D, and is dragged to a meeting with him. The Mafia Don pulls out his gun and is about to execute him, when the cell phone in Tripathi’s pocket rings. In deference to the power of connectivity, 3D, now perhaps an advocate of 3G, pauses a moment till the mobile phone conversation is over. The call happens to be from Tripathi’s wife, who tells him that she has completed the ceremonies for ‘Karwa Chauth’, and is waiting for him to come home. So moved is 3D by this gesture of traditional respect and love from a woman to her husband, and so traumatised is he by the knowledge that his own wife never kept this fast for her husband’s long life – on the contrary, praying for his imminent demise – that he drops the gun and bursts into tears.

After this shocking episode, 3D’s alarmed cohorts take him off to consult a psychiatrist, Dr. Gyan Prakash Buddhisagar (Sanjay Mishra). This redoubtable shrink correctly analyses 3D’s problem as acute remorse and severe depression on account of the abrupt departure of his wife. He recommends an abject and unconditional apology by 3D to his wife, irrespective of which one of the couple has done wrong by the other. But the Don’s pride and false sense of self respect comes in the way, and so he gets the brain wave of telling his side of the story, via the dubious skills of the director he has abducted.

The kidnapped director is called Goldie Kapoor (Arshad Warsi) and he employs a script writer with the ethnically offensive name of Tarun Porno Ghosh (Shreyas Talpade), a man with a faux and exaggerated Bengali accent, who is generally referred to as ‘Porno’.

This is where the film starts moving rapidly downhill, ending up as a rude, sexist, and completely mixed-up farce. Sunny Deol looks passable in the action sequences, but is embarrassingly clueless in his romancing of a once vivacious actress called Preity Zinta. For her part, Zinta appears completely disinterested in her surroundings and in her co-actors, and walks through the motions of her role, actually hamming it up to glory in the scenes where she is expected to be emotional and in love once again with her husband.

Patchwork cutting, songs that appear out of nowhere, and a complete lack of visual continuity, are the classic symptoms of a movie that has run into severe production problems, and is desperate to stitch the story up on the editing table. On paper, the cast has a handsome and appealing look to it. Unfortunately, ‘Bhaiaji Superhit’ will belie your expectations and disillusion you, after just half an hour of watching it.

About The Author

Ajit Duara