‘Wild Wild Punjab’ film overview: Puerile buddy comedy will not be wild sufficient

A nonetheless from ‘Wild Wild Punjab’

It was evident, even earlier than Varun Sharma clambered onto the roof of a automobile, unfastened his fly and shot out a tall projectile of piss, that Wild Wild Punjab was not a critical movie. However is it even that wild? The aforementioned scene might be the looniest factor that occurs — a nod, maybe, to Fukrey 3, which had a complete pee-based plotline devoted to Sharma. The remainder of Simarpreet Singh’s movie is oddly strained and docile, a blur of ham-fisted hi-jinks and inane one-liners. “Respect, dude,” somebody tells Sharma’s character, a praise I can’t lengthen to the movie.

Khanna (Sharma) is reeling from a breakup, his girlfriend having grazed off for greener pastures… who may blame her? Khanna’s buddies — Maan (Sunny Singh), Gaurav (Jassie Gill) and Honey (Manjot Singh) — rustle up a plan to tug him out of his distress. They may journey down from Patiala to Pathankot, gatecrash the marriage of his ex (Asheema Vardaan), and let Khanna say his piece. None of which, after all, goes precisely to plan, because the quartet will get into manic misadventures motoring down the Punjab countryside.

All through, writers Sandeep Jain and Harman Wadala—fleshing out a narrative by Luv Ranjan—site visitors within the lowest of cultural stereotypes. The Punjabis in Wild Wild Punjab come throughout as trigger-happy buffoons, boisterous revelers who siphon alcohol from barrels and have a finicky attachment to their wheels. The disparate issues of the state—drug abuse, suicide, gangsterism, unlawful emigration—turn into puerile punchlines. Honey registers as a mustachioed caricature of a gold-hearted Sardar, his benignancy touched off by a girl in misery calling him ‘Veer-ji’. There may be curiosity, someplace on the juvenile coronary heart of this movie, in analyzing the dowry downside in Punjab. However all that’s undone by traces like, “I’ll slap her…I don’t discriminate between boy and woman,” or everybody referring to Khanna’s ex as ‘veshya’ (actual identify: Vaishali).

It’s an act of heroic restraint, actually, that Pulkit Samrat and Ali Fazal from the Fukrey franchise don’t make cameos on this movie. Sharma, slurry and shit-faced via many of the runtime, taking a belated bullet in his rear finish, is barely distinguishable from any of his previous roles. Sunny Singh appears to be like extra relaxed than he did in Adipurush, having traded the bows and arrows for a buzzcut and piercings. For a buddy comedy, the movie by no means convincingly establishes the dynamics of the group. “There’s a distinction between a Sufi and a gold digger,” Maan declares vis-a-vis Vaishali, but we additionally study that he mooches off his greatest associates.

Wild Wild Punjab runs low on horsepower and horseplay. Simarpreet, a debutant director, struggles to choreograph the degrees of comedic chaos he clearly aspires to: a chase involving a psychedelic truck, an SUV, a scooter and a police van fizzles out with out punch. Close to the climax, a bottle of unlawful capsules is unloaded into rooster feed, but nothing comes of this promising setup. This isn’t a Hangover film, we’re instructed, which struck me as much less a quip than a frank admission of defeat.

Wild Wild Punjab is streaming on Netflix