John Jani Janardhan (Kannada)
Director: Guru Deshpande
Cast: Ajay Rao, Yogesh, ‘Madarangi’ Krishna, Kamna Ranawat, Malashri, M.S.Umesh, Girija Lokesh
It is amusing to see just how much Guru Deshpande tries to ensure John Jani Janardhan is not predictable or obvious. The tragedy, however, is that despite his attempts, John Jani Janardhan is precisely that: extremely predictable and extremely obvious. And quite boring.
You stop following the plot after a point (mostly because there isn’t one) and instead notice the various tactics the filmmaker uses to deliberately mislead his audience and fails. First, he swings between radically opposing genres to confuse his audience.
The opening hook of the film indicates that it is a crime drama about child trafficking and abuse. Before this genre can take its root, Deshpande changes the tone of the film drastically and makes it a sex comedy. For the most part of the film, thereafter, what we see are three heroes (Ajay Rao, Krishna, and Yogesh) salivating at women, drunk lecturing their friends about unrequited love, drunk lecturing again about the female species and drunk lecturing yet again about the man-woman dynamic using the strangest metaphors. To name one of them: men are like mobile phones and women are like water; irrespective of water falling on the phone or vice versa, it is the mobile that gets destroyed.
Up until the climax, the audience is forced to see these three men waste their time, sing songs, dream about scantily clad women in Pattaya etc. But Deshpande knows he needs to return to the crime drama that he began with. So he introduces extremely obvious interjections reminding one of the horrifying criminal waiting on road corners for young girls. By the interval, you know that the three men will be involved in fighting this criminal. But we need to kill time, so we see more songs, more sketches about the three heroes and their friendship, their tryst with women until the climax.
Interestingly, by the time the film reaches the climax, the filmmaker has run out of time. So he runs through a resolution which is also not entirely without problems: instead of law punishing the criminal, the film urges the general public to take law into their own hands and stone the abuser. The filmmaker does not even have time to show how the police zero-in on the criminal. He just conveniently happens to be lurking on the roadside again and police just conveniently have photographs of him too.
John Jani Janardhan is a case study in lazy filmmaking. It is a remake of Nadirshah’s Malayalam film Amar Akbar Anthony. It has poor performances, high decibel noise, boring songs and unfunny gags. You are left a little confused at the end. Was it a sex comedy? Or a serious message film? After all, a conveniently placed message about saving the girl child does little when most of the film is spent salivating at women.
