Remember how Amitabh Bachchan bellows in Pink – “No means No”. Well, it is that unambiguous NO that I suggest you say to Banjo. Why? Because by God, Banjo is unambiguously confusing. It doesn’t know what it wants to be now that it’s a tedious 138-minute long watch! A musical? A thriller? A romance? A social treatise? It is everything all at once and ends up being nothing at all!
We are introduced to the 4 unlikely members of this Banjo playing band. The everyday drudgery of life in a Mumbai chawl hasn’t dampened the spark inside them. They are apparently fire on stage!
Sound tripping on indigenous tunes and melodies, Mickey (Luke Kenny) happens to record their Ganpati song and sends it to his friend in New York. The NRI friend is none other than the leggy lass Nargis Fakhri. Her acting gene still dormant, she catwalks around the streets of New York, headphones on, head banging simultaneously to this Banjo band’s music. She must make her next single with them she vows, arrives in Mumbai practically the next day and quips in her borrowed dubbed voice “It is all so colourful!” Only that the dark grey clouds of a screenplay going into tizzy is there for all to see.
There are many threads simultaneously running and we don’t know what to focus on. And while we try to wrap our heads around this, the songs one after the other only seem like cacophonic distractions! Not exactly the kind of feeling a musical should ideally leave us with!
There is the whole ‘grab chawl land to build commercial property’ angle that is soon abandoned. A rivalry between bands then keeps us company for some time till that evaporates too.
In between, love blossoms between Riteish Deshmukh, the Banjo player, and Nargis the musician who knows nothing else than to sway her hands like an orchestra conductor! How?
He unabashedly checks out her long legs and short shorts and that’s about it. Some more music is played and a little more confusion created with tons of casual sexism thrown in.
Riteish, playing Taraat the brilliant banjo player, money extortionist and bhai with a golden heart all rolled into one, isn’t all that bad. But there is precious little that he can do when award-winning director Ravi Jhadhav lets him down so badly.
Dharmesh Sir, as we know him, isn’t allowed to serenade us with his dance movies. As the band’s drummer, he head bangs a little and has a few broken English jokes.
Nargis Fakhri needs a break and so do we.
Your life is not going to come to an end if you don’t watch this one.
Keep a safe distance.
All I can furnish for a half-baked product such as this is 1 QUINT out of 5!
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)