‘Arjun Patiala’ review: On a road to nowhere

Even before this movie hit the theatres, everyone seemed to have lost interest in it, including its makers

Kriti Sanon and Diljit Dosanjh in ‘Arjun Patiala’

Somewhere in the middle of Arjun Patiala there is a killing scene at a Ferozpur dhaba. A top criminal is finished off by the innocent, boyish-looking sharp-shooter Sakool (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub) in a cool, matter-of-fact manner. It is the one and only bit that elevates the spoof to what it needs to have been through and through. But, unfortunately, the innovation ends there. Despite the role being tiny, Ayyub tries to execute it with pokerfaced conviction and, in the process, turns the silliness into something marginally sublime. It turns out to be the only remotely interesting thing about a film that just doesn’t seem to hold.

Ferozpur cop Arjun Patiala (Diljit Dosanjh) and his sidekick Onidda Singh (Varun Sharma) are on mission to wipe out crime in their own unique way: by letting rowdies take on other rowdies and kill each other. On the sidelines, a romance is brewing between the cop and a firebrand journalist Ritu Randhawa (Kriti Sanon). All this in itself, is a film being narrated by a writer-director (Abhishek Banerjee) to the producer (Pankaj Tripathi) in what forms the prologue before the opening credits roll on.

Arjun Patiala

• Director: Rohit Jugraj
• Starring: Diljit Dosanjh, Kriti Sanon, Varun Sharma, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Seema Pahwa
• Run time: 106 minutes
• Storyline: Ferozpur cop Arjun and his sidekick Onidda Singh are on mission to wipe out crime

Arjun Patiala feels like a Punjabi film masquerading as a Bollywood one. The humour is deliberately rough and rustic and the filmmaking clunky. The hero has a glad eye, uses some utterly banal and incorrect lines about maa behen ki izzat but gets away from it all by giving a self-righteous lecture on consent. Dosanjh is his usual likeable self, Sanon adopts the pretty and perky mode and Sharma looks like he is still living in Fukrey. Once a Choocha Singh, always a Choocha Singh. Tripathi does another one of his lucky comic mascot turns. Like him, there are several other talented names — Banerjee and Seema Pahwa as the sweater-knitting MLA — who get wasted despite showing some little spark. Even before the film could hit the theatres, everyone seemed to have lost interest in it, including the makers.