The struggles of an amateur football team in a Madhya Pradesh town, the aspirations of a budding magician, the love story of a hopeless romantic. Netflix’s Jaadugar, starring Panchayat actor Jitendra Kumar, takes inspiration from several tried and tested storylines and combines them into one. Directed by Sameer Saxena and written by Biswapati Sarkar, this engaging slice-of-life film manages to strike the right balance between family drama, romance and comedy with an underdog story at the heart of it.

The movie premiered on Netflix on July 15. In its first week, Jaadugar is at the no. 1 spot on Netflix India’s Top 10 movies list.

Here are four reasons why you should add this two-hour-46-minute movie to your watchlist:

The performances

The biggest sell for the movie is the well-chosen cast. Most of us are familiar with Jitendra’s brand of acting through Kota Factory and Panchayat. He delivers a similarly brilliant performance as Meenu Narang/Magic Meenu, mixing serious and funny.

Arushi Sharma plays Meenu’s love interest, Disha Chhabra. After smaller roles in movies like Tamasha and Love Aaj Kal, Arushi stuns as the lead lady in Jaadugar. Jaaved Jaaferi, as Meenu’s uncle Pradeep Narang, plays an utterly relatable character who struggles to be a father and a mentor figure to Meenu and the neighbourhood football team. Even in his short presence in the film, Manoj Joshi as Jaadugar Chhabra leaves a lasting impression.

The minor characters are created and essayed with a level of perfection that we all can say “I know someone exactly like that!”

Wholesome plotline

Who does not love an underdog story? Here’s the neighbourhood football team that kept coming in second place till it lost its star player and now it comes last in the league. The team consists of misfits who are at each other’s throats most of the time. They are brought together when Meenu is forced to put the team on a winning path to win his lady love’s hand in marriage. However, while movies like Chak De! India and 83 have a predictable end with the underdogs taking home a win, Jaadugar sees the team lose the tournament but win people’s respect.

Alongside the motivational sports film angle, the movie also has wholesome bits surrounding various family dynamics.

Comedy for all

Jaadugar is a movie that families can definitely watch together. There are a few moments where we get glimpses of cerebral, dark comedy, especially when we see Meenu’s childhood flashbacks, but on the whole it is easy to understand. The comedy will specially strike a chord with those familiar with the content produced by The Viral Fever (TVF). Some of the characters are dumbed down to make them funnier and this works well in the film.

A new take on old-school Bollywood romantic heroes

The plot may mostly revolve around the underdog angle, but at its core Jaadugar is a romcom. It explores the different loves of Meenu’s life, from Kulfi to Disha. It borrows elements from problematic male romantic figures from yesteryears to create the unrealistically romantic Meenu. He is the kind of man who falls in love with a woman at first sight, then proceeds to stalk her and try to woo her with the most cringy lines possible. Even when in a relationship, he is so self-engrossed that he never hears what the woman has to say. Instead of focusing on making the relationship work, he thinks that grand gestures and dialogues can solve any relationship problem.

All of this is washed away by the end of the movie as Meenu is made to realise that love is not just saying that he loves the person. He realises that any relationship takes effort to build and maintain. The movie does not try to be preachy about how not to woo a woman. Through Meenu’s progression, it evolves the old-school romantic hero character into a more non-problematic one.