The film begins with a long disclaimer elaborating on how it is giving a contemporary twist to mythology but, in the process, doesn’t intend hurting religious sentiments. However, lest this raise your expectations that Hanuman Da Damdaar would offer a modern outlook and progressive values to the coming generation be sufficiently warned that it certainly doesn’t.
Yes there is a feeble, irreverent attempt at humanising the gods—a yo-dude speaking Vishnu who has a habit of getting into contractual agreements with his bhakts—but it remains half-hearted and too obvious a gag.
What the film does in the name of modernising is that it marries the mythology of yore with contemporary myth-making, i.e. Bollywood. So the older Hanuman (only for a few minutes of the screen time) speaks in the voice of Salman Khan and self-reflexively parrots his famous lines—from “ Ek baar jo maine commitment kar li ” to “ Mujhpe ye ehsaan karma” — a tad too convenient and easy a device to raise laughs.
It’s not the flat visuals or the stale jokes. What irks and pains about the film is that instead of offering an alternative to the Bollywood brand of entertainment that the children are anyhow perennially exposed to, it ends up peddling the worst of its stereotypes to them—the predictable, slapstick humour; the scatological jokes; the broad caricatures of the “accented” South Indians, “loud” Haryanvis and Punjabis and the cringe-worthy, the token gay guy who is the butt of the jokes. I was also intrigued by the colour coding—how the good guys and those up in the hierarchy are fair (and beautiful) and how the villains and those down in the classist world are dark (and ugly). It’s unfortunate, that this regressiveness is getting reiterated in the name of fun and masti .
Some sequences with the creatures of the forest are cute and the peppy music comes with an infectious charm. But largely Hanuman Da Damdaar is disappointing in not setting new standards for children’s entertainment.
