Kartik Bhardwaj

A man slipping off a banana peel might be the most archaic, juvenile way to induce laughs. Dhamaal 4 has it. It also has people getting electrocuted, getting hit in the crotch, getting hit on the head, getting attacked by a tiger, a crocodile, tribals and… an octopus, and also hanging, God so much hanging, from CGI cliffs, CGI buildings and CGI hot air balloons. Remove the zany background music and the film actually seems like a Final Destination installment. Just that death only comes for our brain cells.

Nothing good happens to Akshaye Khanna in an SUV. In Dhurandhar (2025), he narrowly escapes an assassination attempt inside the car and now, in Siddharth P Malhotra’s courtroom-drama Ikka, a girl’s bloodied body falls off his vehicle’s shotgun seat in the dead of the night. Akshaye’s Shauryaman Gaur is the perfect villain. He is a politician’s brat whose smugness alone seems to be substantial evidence for the crime. But did he actually do it? Or was it just a slip that metastasized into a sin?

In a scene from Satluj, the protagonist Jaswant Singh Khalra (Diljit Dosanjh) talks about the first time humans might have observed the sun set. “They must have thought now the sun will never come back,” he says. “But a lamp, sitting in a hut, didn’t agree. It challenged the darkness.” It’s a haphazard anecdote which has clear historical loopholes but the metaphor hits. Sometimes, it’s important to not win but to only put up a fight.

After her husband played a different kind of alpha in Animal (2023), Alia Bhatt arrives to kick some man rears in YRF spy-universe’s first female-led actioner Alpha. Here girls get more agency than the freedom of choosing their partners. They get it done. They can man a machine gun, throw deadly knives, break limbs and climb mountains in shorts and sneakers, all while being powered by some Scooty Pep ad optimism: “Stubborn girls change the world.”

You watch the interview of any 90s Hindi film actor and they will inevitably mention how often there used to be no script on set. Director Ahmed Khan brings back this magic of the 90s in Welcome To The Jungle, an anything-goes madcap movie which oscillates between funny one-liners and absolute brainrot. It’s a film about the making of a flop film and thus it tries to hide its stupidity behind the garb of meta-ness. It can be silly, absurd and often baffling. At a moment, it has Suneil Shetty’s face covered in cocaine. That surely sums things up.

Let’s talk about the art of the Hindi film disclaimer. It used to be the good-old “all events and characters shown in this film are fictional, any resemblance to any existing people, event or place is purely coincidental.” But when it comes to propaganda slop, this disclaimer can be practically anything. It can be “inspired” by real people”, “inspired” by true events and in the latest Governor, “a version of true events that merges many incidents in one timeline suitable to the film.” This gives the makers an opportunity to peddle anything. Merge everything in one timeline. We got independence, but in 2014.

“There behind barbed wire, on one side, lay India and behind more barbed wire, on the other side, lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.” Manto’s short story and its essence hit me like a truck while experiencing Imtiaz Ali’s poetic, Partition-era romantic-drama Main Vaapas Aaunga. Just like Toba Tek Singh, now lies Ishar Singh Grewal (Naseeruddin Shah) on his deathbed. His soul too seems stuck in the barbed wire between India and Pakistan. It can’t depart. He is grabbing on to see his pre-Partition city of Sargodha for one last time, to see Jiya/ Afsana for one last time. This girl of his youth smiles in his blurred dreams and says, “See, no. My chaand bali (earring) has fallen off somewhere. Will you find it for me?”

After reviewing innumerable Hindi films over the years, one develops a certain kind of thick skin. You can start believing that nothing can really shake your brain-matter. Then comes a film like Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai and you get a reality check. If you find yourself watching this film in the theatre and witness somebody laughing hysterically long after the punchline has passed, please excuse them. They are questioning their choices. If there can be tears of joy, there also can be guffaws of sorrow.