There is so much wood in every frame of Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan that one wouldn’t be wrong in assuming that one has stumbled into a furniture showroom. Before you get your heads and minds in a twist, let me assure you that the only body part of the film’s actors I am referring to is their faces.
Led by the world’s universal ‘Bhaijaan’, every actor in Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan is as stiff as a freshly starched lungi. But even that is not spared in this monstrosity of a movie where the words ‘lungi’ and ‘dance’ will never be the same again once you have watched the perverted pelvic movements in Yentamma, which has lines like. ‘Bajaa pungi utha lungi’. And that is not even the most offensive bit about Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan. The whole film is.
All 144 minutes of this mindless masala mess is an aural and visual assault. In fact, KKBKKJ (even writing the full name of this film would mean giving it some respect) offends senses even beyond the five (or six) that we are said to have. That isn’t a surprise given who is at the helm of affairs here. Farhad Samji — who has the last two Housefull films and last year’s Bachchhan Paandey to his name — is a repeat offender, with the news of him directing the new Hera Pheri film making #RemoveFarhad SamjiFromHeraPheri trend on Twitter for weeks. In this film, Samji had just one job — lift the 2014 Tamil film Veeram and make a frame-by-frame remake. He, of course, fails even in something as basic.
To be fair, it isn’t all Samji’s fault. There’s nothing much that a director can do when his larger-than-life hero decides to play what he has been playing all his life — himself. Yes, KKBKKJ is supposed to be an Id entertainer; yes, there are die-hard fans who will queue up to watch Bhai rip off his shirt, spout banal lines in his trademark deadpan (more dead than pan) and singlehandedly punch his way through 50 goons in less than five minutes. But this is also a Salman Khan who has given us films like Bajrangi Bhaijaan and Sultan on Id, even while he has fed the Salman Khan persona to some degree. There is absolutely no excuse or justification for how unwatchable his new film is.
KKBKKJ has Salman as Bhaijaan. He doesn’t know what his name is. Which is good enough, given how ridiculous the names of his three adopted brothers are. They are called Love, Ishq and Moh. Their girlfriends are named Muskaan, Chahat, Sukoon. The film’s leading lady — played by Pooja Hegde — is called Bhagya and, in short, Baggy. All the brainstorming in this film clearly went into choosing the names of its characters. By the way, towards the end of the film, when I found myself barely alive in my seat, Salman landed a header on the villain and called it ‘brainstorming’. Trust me, this is not the kind of stuff one can make up.
Salman, caught in the formulaic rut which may still invite some catcalls and wolf-whistles, is present in almost every frame, clearly reading out lines from a teleprompter hidden somewhere on a set which looks so fake that a house sign saying ‘Shanti Sadan’ has a poster below it that reads, ‘Vancouver International Wine Festival’. When a film is this bad, you clearly start concentrating on other things.
In his introduction scene, a long-haired Salman flings his leather jacket off a balcony, then jumps after it and manages to wear it when both he and his jacket are somewhere in the air. Every time he sends goons flying (there is even ‘flying’ CGI blood), the background score screams, ‘You butterfly, you better fly!’
The film is peopled with Bigg Boss rejects or their progenies (Shehnaz Gill, Palak Tiwari), as well as Salman’s former heroines (Bhagyashree, Bhumika Chawla) all of who have one job — to act as Bhai’s cheerleaders. In one of the many, many scenes after Bhaijaan has sent some sword-wielding goons packing, his cronies unsubtly wave Pepsi bottles in the air and scream, ‘Swag style Pepsi, hamara Bhai sexy’. Yes, it just keeps getting worse and worse.
The film’s idea of ‘pan India’ — that fashionable term that now functions as the tagline of every big-budget South Indian film — is to shift the action to Hyderabad (from that ugly set in what is supposedly Delhi) after interval. Which gives Venkatesh Daggubati and Jagapathi Babu some screen time. Venkatesh is strictly okay (in one scene he’s described as, “He’s the women empowerment type”), while Jagapathi Babu snarls like a grizzly old bear looking for cocaine (on an aside, you would do better to stream Cocaine Bear on rent on Prime Video than waste money on this). He gives ‘wooden’ a whole new meaning, but does far better than boxer Vijender Singh who plays a villain perpetually clad in a three-piece suit.
Which finally brings me to my favourite bit of Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan. Pooja Hegde’s character calls herself a ‘conservator restorer’, but not once during the course of the film is she seen around an antique or a relic. Oh wait, there’s Salman!
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