Pyaar ka Punchnama which released in 2011 became a surprise hit. The two main reasons – Divyendu Sharma who breathed life into his character of Liquid and Kartik Aaryan’s (then known as Kartik Tiwari) hilarious monologue about the travails of falling in love with women.
In Pyaar ka Punchnama 2 the former is sadly absent and the monologue is longer, unfunny and utterly forced. Director Luv Ranjan wants to call it a sequel. I would say it’s nothing better than a bad copy of the original.
Bankruptcy of new ideas is written all over this tedious 136 minutes watch. Except for a change of location where the party shifts from Goa to Thailand and the two new entrants Omkar Kapoor and Sunny Singh, everything else stays the same – not just the story template and the rest of the cast and crew but also the jokes. The result is a painfully stale attempt at filmmaking.
The takeaway is also same – women are the most beautiful and the most manipulative of God’s creations – impossible to please and excruciatingly difficult to understand. Fifteen minutes into the film, the three friends Gogo (Kartik Aaryan), Thakur (Omkar Kapoor) and Sid (Sunny Singh) get themselves their respective hot chicks, namely Nushrat Barucha, Ishita Raj and Sonalli Sehgall. Together they tread the beaten track laid out for them by writers Rahul Mody, Tarun Jain and Luv Ranjan.
Pyaar ka Punchnama too was a one-sided, biased treatise spoken from a man’s point of you but it worked because it was supremely funny in parts; the characters to an extent relatable and situations believable. But this one has women as curvy fiends who are just cardboard cutouts of each other, caricaturish, shrill and unconvincing. It’s also hard to ignore the strain of misogyny that runs throughout. Luv Ranjan managed to camouflage it well in his directorial venture with some genuinely entertaining moments but in this one it has a deadly grip on the entire narrative.
Everything is the same – the fights, the patch ups and the curtain raiser for another monologue delivered by the same actor – only this time with greater self consciousness and staler punches. A couple of chuckles sprinkled thrifty is all that there is on offer.
In the acting department apart from Sunny Singh who plays an affable ‘almost sardar’ and shows some promise and Omkar Kapoor who displays his squinted eye smile no one else matters. Kartik and Nushrat are exhausted and Shonalli and Ishita forgettable.
One must really hate good cinema and women in general to love this one! I’ll give Pyaar ka Punchnama 2 1 QUINT OUT OF 5.
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