How much one enjoys a film like Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 has got a lot to do with one’s tolerance for whining. It’s like attending a tumultuous residents’ association meeting. There’s a lot of complaining and offensive things being said, but it’s also sort of fun, especially if you’re not the one who’s being abused.
Pyaar Ka Punchnama 2 is like that, but goes a bit too far. It begins, like the first part, with three flatmates starting to date three women.
Their major life issue now changes from lack of women, to women being the chief cause of all their problems.
While the first film owes much of its success to the novelty of its idea — that of three hopeful men who unfortunately end up with the worst women — there’s little extra that seems to have been added in this film, beyond the generic women-bashing. Of course, the film is now bigger, with fancier homes, cars and wardrobes, but the men only seem to have become dumber. For instance, it takes the guy dating the gold digger to get a credit card bill for Rs. 8,50,000 before he realises she’s not the angel he thought she was.
The dangler, on the other hand, even manages to get one last night with her boyfriend, even after she tells him she’s getting married to her NRI groom. Wouldn’t mature adults have dealt with this differently?
But I suppose these are not things one should think too deeply about in a Luv Ranjan film.
He is the Yo Yo Honey Singh of Hindi cinema and the Pyaar Ka Punchnama series is a medium for him to dish out misogyny in the garb of fun. The film’s story too, then, is just cloth to patch together a bunch of dialogues that are funny only as a WhatsApp forward — like the five-minute rant by Kartik Aaryan about his problems with women in the first film.
This film, too, has a similar speech, which peaks at an inspired joke about how both Jack and Rose of Titanic would have survived had Rose offered to float on the door in alternate 15-minute shifts.
But Luv Ranjan isn’t one to quit when he’s ahead. He over-milks the moment until it becomes too tiring to listen.
Given how the audiences seemed to be enjoying the film though, I guess we should expect a third part as well. Let’s see if Luv can make a Pyaar Ka Punchnama told from the perspective of the women. That perhaps would be a worthy sequel.
