Logic, chronology, geography, sensitivity, ear drums and brain cells all take a hike in Baby John.
The big-budget production that attempts to launch Varun Dhawan as an all-out action star is an all-round assault on the senses, partially redeemed by only a few clap-worthy moments mostly credited to ‘VD’, which is what the baby-faced actor is introduced as at the beginning of Baby John.
I haven’t watched Theri, the 2016 Tamil blockbuster which was purely a fan-service exercise for diehard followers of Thalapathy Vijay. I am not sure if Varun has the kind of fans — I mean by demographic and not volume — that would queue up feverishly to watch him defy the laws of physics to make easy work of 10 men at one go or swing his sunglasses in one swift movement as some sort of a signature style, a mid-level tribute to everyone from the iconic Rajinikanth to the magnetic Chulbul Pandey.
Whether one has watched Theri or not is of little consequence because everything in Baby John is a mindless mish-mash of every film from the southern shores that has been made and remade in the last 10 years, albeit cranked up several notches. So when Varun’s man in uniform — IPS Satya Verma aka “only good vibes” — introduces himself as “mere jaise bahut aaye honge, lekin main pehli baar aaya hoon”, it feels like Baby John is trolling itself.
Baby John is signature Atlee. The filmmaker, who has given Tamil cinema its fair share of masala madness, mostly with Vijay as the leading man, sprung to the collective consciousness of the country with Shah Rukh Khan’s Jawan last year. Theri was directed by Atlee; in Baby John, Atlee’s assistant Kalees steps up to take over the directorial reins, but he doesn’t have much to bring in of his own here. Baby John follows the done-to-death template that trademarks every Atlee film — predictable plot which is mostly hinged on a revenge-retribution-redemption template, a bouquet of civic issues that enables prolonged social commentary that often turns shrewdly manipulative, and action that quickly travels from stylised to tedious.
The film, running over a butt-numbing 164 minutes, opens with a scene of girls being trafficked at a sea port by a gang of goons, all of them laughing hysterically as if they have just walked out of an Archana Puran Singh tutorial. Cut to the backwaters of Alappuzha whose serenity is disrupted by the kind of precocious child actor that is considered cute in Bollywood cinema. Her father is ‘Baby John’ (Varun), sporting a beard, who runs a bakery and is unable to even swat a fly, which makes it evident that there will be an antithetical backstory to the character. Father and daughter (Khushi, played by Zara Zyanna, a six-year-old with 1M followers on Instagram) spend the majority of the film calling each other ‘baby’, but that is not the most atrocious thing about Baby John.
The entry of Khushi’s teacher (played by Wamiqa Gabbi) takes Baby John down a road that forces him to confront a life he had left behind and eventually get back to being his old self for the safety of his daughter. After Citadel: Honey Bunny, this is the second time in as many months that Varun has had to do the same. The result in both cases has been largely lacklustre.
More convincing as a father out to protect his daughter than a trigger-happy supercop, Varun is still the only reason you would want to give Baby John a watch. Satya Verma’s backstory is Ghajini redux, but the romance between Satya and Meera (Keerthy Suresh makes her Hindi film debut) doesn’t have the emotional depth that the almost-love story of Sanjay/Sachin and Kalpana had in Ghajini. When Kalpana was killed mercilessly, we all teared up. That is not the case here. In fact, you barely feel it.
Which brings us to the USP of Baby John. The action in the film has been designed by an eight-member team of Indian and international names, counted as among the best in the business. The fights are decently choreographed but the action relies too much on external factors. In each, there has to be blinding rain, fire, thunder, lightning, overuse of light and shade, and most certainly, a deafening background score. At the end of Baby John, what will definitely stay with you is the din. Adding to the noise is Jackie Shroff’s unhinged villain with a God complex. His signature is not holding a plant or screaming ‘Bhidu’; it involves inexplicably mounting one dhoti-clad leg on the arm of an ancient-looking chair.
After an overstretched first half, Baby John does well in crafting a tighter and more interesting Half Two. The songs scored by Thaman are semi-hummable, particularly Nain mattaka, with Diljit Dosanjh featuring in as many Bolly collabs this year as he has made stage appearances. Sumit Arora’s dialogues lack the punch that a film like this needed, but Rajpal Yadav gets to deliver the best line (on comedy, though he doesn’t play a comedian here) in the film.
There is a twist in Wamiqa’s character which doesn’t leave much impact while the protracted climax involves Varun brandishing a gun and sitting atop a horse which itself stands on a ship container. Don’t even go there!
What remains memorable once the curtains come down on Baby John — and what also sets the tone for at least another film in the franchise — is a cameo by Salman Khan. This is a blistering appearance by the superstar and a huge improvement over his rushed, half-baked cameo in Singham Again last month. Salman, truly in his element, indulges in some self-deprecating humour that revolves around the word ‘baby’ and talks about him becoming a father (“Mere haath mein nahin hain,” he says, mock defeatedly). His character, as it flashes on screen in a huge title card, is called ‘Agent Bhaijaan’. ‘Baby Bhaijaan’, though cute, doesn’t quite make the cut.