‘Baby John’ has all the trappings of a mass entertainer, having been produced by Atlee, the record-maker ‘Jawan’ director whose remake of Tamil film ‘Their’ it is. Headlined by a fairly bankable star, Varun Dhawan, who can certainly act, he does try to energise the proceedings. South Indian sensation Keerthy Suresh is making her Bollywood debut and yesterday’s ‘Hero’ Jackie Shroff plays the vilest of vile badman. On the side is the beautiful and talented Wamiqa Gabbi.

Nothing screams ‘crisis’ in Hindi cinema right now more than Salman Khan showing up in his second ‘star cameo’ of the year – hedging his bets between two cinematic universes; hoping at least one of them works. Something works. This is not a spoiler, given how the film’s PR and fan accounts are enthusiastically ‘leaking’ his entry scene on social media. Khan’s films proudly flaunted their ‘critic-proof’ status for a long time, but have looked increasingly silly in the last five years. Apart from YRF’s spy universe, Khan’s Chulbul Pandey has announced himself in the Rohit Shetty cop universe, and now alongside Varun Dhawan in the Baby John universe – where he’s called (what else, but) Agent Bhai Jaan. It looks like even Bollywood’s loosest canon is looking to diversify his portfolio, fervently praying to make windfall gains from one franchise. The devil-may-care swagger has been replaced with the caution of a star unsure of his place.

Logic, chronology, geography, sensitivity, ear drums and brain cells all take a hike in Baby John. The big-budget production that attempts to launch Varun Dhawan as an all-out action star is an all-round assault on the senses, partially redeemed by only a few clap-worthy moments mostly credited to ‘VD’, which is what the baby-faced actor is introduced as at the beginning of Baby John. I haven’t watched Theri, the 2016 Tamil blockbuster which was purely a fan-service exercise for diehard followers of Thalapathy Vijay. I am not sure if Varun has the kind of fans — I mean by demographic and not volume — that would queue up feverishly to watch him defy the laws of physics to make easy work of 10 men at one go or swing his sunglasses in one swift movement as some sort of a signature style, a mid-level tribute to everyone from the iconic Rajinikanth to the magnetic Chulbul Pandey.

Like all bad films, Kalees’ Baby John gets worse by the second. But like a special kind of bad film, the progression happens in leaps and bounds. If the first fifteen minutes are infuriating, half an hour later the film makes you question your life’s choices. By the time the first half closes, you are having an existential meltdown and as the end credits roll, your orientation to reality has altered. Was that real? Was he real? Is any of this real or are we stuck in a parallel universe of Atlee’s imagination where everything on screen unravels as a duller version of his stylistic choices?

2016 में एक तमिल एक्शन-थ्रिलर फिल्म आई थी ‘थेरी’। इसमें कहानी, स्क्रिप्ट और निर्देशन एटली का था। वही एटली, जिन्हें हम हिन्दी वाले अब शाहरुख खान की फिल्म ‘जवान’ के डायरेक्टर के तौर पर पहचानते हैं। हालांकि ‘थेरी’ भी कोई ओरिजनल फिल्म नहीं थी लेकिन उस समय तमिल में यह सुपरहिट हुई और बाद में इसके डब संस्करण को हिन्दी वालों ने भी यहां-वहां खूब देखा। अब इतने साल बाद उसी ‘थेरी’ का हिन्दी रीमेक आया है जिसके निर्माताओं में एटली भी हैं। लेकिन एटली ने इसे निर्देशित नहीं किया है बल्कि साऊथ के ही कालीस से निर्देशित करवाया है। अपनी बेटी के साथ केरल के एक छोटे-से कस्बे में बेकरी चला रहा बेबी जॉन मारधाड़ से परे रहने वाला आदमी है। लेकिन तभी कुछ ऐसा होता है कि वह वापस अपने उस हिंसक अवतार में आ जाता है जब वह एक दबंग पुलिस अफसर हुआ करता था जो बुरे लोगों को पटक-पटक कर मारता था। क्या कारण था कि जो उसने पुलिस की नौकरी छोड़ी? अब क्या कारण है कि वह वापस मारधाड़ करने लगा?

At a late stage in the film, Rajpal Yadav’s character, who plays a side-kick to the hero, gets the best line of Baby John: comedy is serious business. It was about the only time I heard a ripple of laughter in the preview theatre. It is the kind of punchline that masala movies use to bring the house down. And it says a great deal about Baby John, which weighs in at a punishing 164 minutes, that a comic’s dialogue gets more taalis than the hero’s ‘taqia kalaam’ line: ‘par main toh pehli baar aaya hoon’.

“Papa, I want a lal batti gaadi and people to salute me. I want to be a minister,” says a goon with a nose stud to his grotesque dad. He gets it on a platter. In the wake of last year’s Jawan and this year’s Pushpa, the fondly-held theory that south Indian filmmakers have cracked the box-office code, gets busted with writer-director Kalees’ remake of Atlee’s 2016 Tamil film Theri. The exhausting plot in two sentences: fearless IPS officer DCP Satya Verma (Varun Dhawan) is on a collision course when he takes on gruesomely repulsive gangster Babbar Sher (Jackie Shroff) and kills his criminal son. The same one who wanted a lal batti gaadi and maims, tortures and sets on fire, helpless young girls.

A boy of maybe five or six stands over his dead parents. They’re in a row of bodies on the ground in front of a high-rise, construction workers who died because of low-quality netting. The builder at fault calls the boy over (he’s from the northeast—migrant labour!), gives him 10 rupees and tells him to buy some chocolate. In the next scene, John (Varun Dhawan) crashes the builder’s party, decimates his goons, and sends the man crashing through a window to his death. One of the onlookers is the young boy, who takes a triumphant bite of chocolate.