Just before the year-end, movie-goers are fed yet another sequel that involves man-children, toilet humour, and lots and lots of pointless ribaldry in a plot that is so wafer-thin, you could see through it from a mile away.
One would imagine that Choocha (Varun Sharma), Hunny (Pulkit Samrat), Zafar (Ali Fazal), and Lali (Manjot Singh) would have grown out of their big dreams and short-cuts. But there’s little hope, especially when Choocha continues to be more daft than he was in the original and is given plenty of importance to revel in his daftness and a fairly questionable sense of naivety.
Bholi Punjaban, a character that Richa Chadda underplays, is free from jail and goes after the boys. They have a debt to pay and she has a mission to work on. She tries to make use of them, earn money, and pay off her own debts with the minister Babulal Bhatia (Rajiv Gupta). Soon enough, more webs are spun, and the addition of a tiger and a cave leads to everybody hunting for some treasure that Choocha dreamed of. Things go awry, they get into deeper trouble, and the rest is how they salvage themselves if not the plot.
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In Fukrey Returns, the boys haven’t learnt much in life. The film marks the return of the smart alec a.k.a captain of the group. Then there’s the one who gets pushed around, even by his sweet shop-running father. There’s the quiet but the smart one, who tries his best to get his shit together. And then there’s the stupid one who is the butt of all the jokes, and never seems to grow up.
Hunny, the smug man-child, is given the freedom to flex his insane amount of over-confidence even if it practically yields to nothing. It’s as though the man-child refuses to even try any method that’s simple and uncomplicated, always trying to lead the group towards the more “fun” side.
And then there’s Zafar and Lali, who are just… there. There’s very little they contribute to but, surprisingly, are the only ones who posses some talent and maturity. Their severely underwritten characters in this film reduce them to mere spectators in what should’ve simply been called ‘The Adventures of Choocha and Hunny’.
The film begins with one of Choocha’s dream, where he and Hunny are taking a dump in the fields and Hunny gets bitten by a snake on the butt. Choocha, the trusted friend, sucks the poison out and watches the snake transform into Bholi Punjaban, the gangster whom he has a huge crush on. And they romance, until the man-child is woken by his fed-up mother.
This pretty much sums up how the entire film surfaces, with comic scenes woven together to form a film, where the plot is of absolute no importance, let alone attempt to make sense.
Pankaj Tripathi, who has given stellar performances in recent times especially with Newton, appears to be quite a miscast even though his role is a reprisal from the first Fukrey film. He still manages to be the scene stealer, making the most of his character Panditji who loves to show off his English-speaking skills. His dialogues aren’t exactly funny, but the actor sure knows how to deliver lines that elicit more laughter than the actual jokes written in the film.
The one’s who rarely get a chance to show much, apart from Manjot Singh and Ali Fazal, are the two other female characters, Priya (played by Priya Anand) and Neetu (Vishakha Singh). They appear for a few minutes, with characters that do nothing to lift the plot or the scenes.
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If the film must really be known for something, it’s the scenes that involve food really. In one scene, Babulal serves the boys chicken and paneer tikkas hot from the barbecue grill. The chicken, sizzling and oozing juicy masalas, are served with spoonfuls of green chutney. And they crunch away while uttering their dialogues. It’s hard to keep up when you have characters chomping on hot barbecued food.
There’s another scene when the boys hide under a bridge and have Panditji visit them with food. It isn’t clear what they’re having, but it’s piping hot breakfast with dollops of red oily masala.
Recommended
And then there’s another, where Babulal, while waiting for Bholi, eats his Chinese food with such seriousness, one can almost hear the meticulous chewing and grinding. The food, in plastic containers, is laid out on the table, appearing just as inviting as the food at a small get-together function.
But apart from that, and barring a few performances, Fukrey Returns is the average entertainer, and an assault to one’s senses that should’ve never really returned.
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The Fukrey Returns review is a Silverscreen original article. It was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the movie. Silverscreen.in and its writers do not have any commercial relationship with movies that are reviewed on the site.