There is something about courtrooms that make our Bollywood filmmakers go berserk! Because Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court is not the norm, but a Halley’s Comet that zooms past us only once in a long long time and for which we should be eternally grateful to our perfectly aligned stars.
Still despite making concessions to mainstream contrivances, Jolly LLB’s sincerity managed to hit the right chord. The writing was brilliantly satirical, the humour wasn't slapstick and Arshad Warsi was a jolly good fellow!
Now we have Akshay Kumar, a bigger star and so the stakes are higher. Which is no justification, but still a plausible explanation for the “let’s please everyone” mantra. There are songs that don’t need to be there at all, a female lead – Huma Quraishi – whose absence would make absolutely no difference to the trajectory, slapstick dialogues that sometimes appear crass and badly sketched characters who exist simply to aid Jagdishwar Mishra aka Jolly aka Akshay Kumar to play with aplomb the “hero” of this Hindi picture .
Jolly who is whiling away time assisting senior lawyer Rizwi dreams for having a chamber of his own. Circumstances and Subhash Kapoor’s script conspire to help him develop a conscience.
He is soon dodging bullets and taking the “system” head on as he decides to fight for justice and convict the murderers of an innocent man.
Frankly, the “in court” scenes still retain some of the crisp satire of the original.
Saurabh Shukla as Justice Sunderlal Tripathi, with all his carefully honed idiosyncrasies, is the best thing in the film. Annu Kapoor, who is Jolly’s main adversary and matches him in his quick repartees, is as usual a pleasure to watch .
There are dollops of melodrama – bhashans, dhamkis , taaliyan and rona dhona – but the performances of these seasoned actors somehow bring about a degree of credibility.
Akshay Kumar is a star with a loyal fan-following judging by the number of people who turned up to watch Jolly LLB 2 FDFS. They cheered when he cracked his one-liners. If you fall in that category, you would probably enjoy the movie. Kumar isn’t bad at all. But for those of us jinka “dil mange more” – this would be a very average performance by a man who can do much much better in a film that can be much better. I give it a very generous 2.5 Quint's out of 5.
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