Varun Dhawan's wild and ambitious shot at demonstrating his hi-jinks action chops takes next to no time to come apart at the seams. Baby John simply does not possess a spindle sturdy enough to bear the weight of the inexcusable excess that the exercise unleashes.
The Bollywood actor is all ready for the performance but the turgid show that he stakes his all on lacks the meat that could absorb the masala-laden flab that quickly develops around the core of the film. Baby John is a creaky, scrappy and hopelessly disjointed movie that looks for inspiration in all the wrong places.
Rajpal Yadav, cast against type as a serious-minded policeman who works alongside the crusading hero, admits in one scene: Comedy is serious business. Indeed. Action, needless to say, is ever more so. That is why parts of Baby John do not quite work. Dhawan's cherubic charm is rather hard to conceal behind the crusty, infallible tough guy mask.
All that the slapdash exercise, a remake of the 2016 Tamil superhit Theri, yields is terribly stale schtick, a turgid mess that lurches from one fusty idea to another without a single saving grace, or a single grain of originality, in sight.
The film is centred on a psychopathic villain (he calls himself Babbar Sher, meaning mighty lion), a peacenik supercop ("good vibes only," he spouts more than once) and a precocious motherless child who is the apple of the latter's eye. So, what's new?
The director of Theri, Atlee, is the producer of Baby John. However, the percentage that he derived from the original Vijay-led mass entertainer eludes Kalees, the writer and director of the Hindi rehash that follows the old script for the most part but is unable to replicate the mass appeal that helped steer Theri over the line and beyond.
With little novelty in the mix and the fight sequences and shootouts reeking of stylistic obsolescence, Baby John feels like just another actioner in search of relevance. A part of the story plays out in the present, and a largish chunk is a flashback set in Mumbai, where the hero enjoys celebrity status owing to his crime-busting record.
Deputy Commissioner of Police Satya Verma's exploits in the metropolis catches the attention of Meera (Keerthy Suresh in her first Hindi film), a doctor interning in a hospital where goons roughed up by the cop have been wheeled in for first aid. Cupid strikes. Musical interludes happen, not only slowing down the film but also diluting its overall impact.
And then, inevitably, a series of sequences are devoted to the lovebirds negotiating with their respective parents - the boy's mother (Sheeba Chaddha) and the girl's father - in order to secure approval for their marriage.
Dedicated to "all fathers", Baby John puts a mild spin on the good-versus-evil battle by turning it into an all-out good-dad-bad-dad spectacle in which the women are reduced to playing strictly relational roles. Meera, who is a house surgeon, thinks nothing of submerging herself into the shallow boxes that marriage and motherhood place her in.
At the start of one of the film's most crucial sequences, Meera says that she is "complete" as a woman because she has a loving husband, a doting mother-in-law and an angel-like daughter. If that were not enough, she also poses a leading question to her husband: Main kaisi biwi hoon (what kind of a wife am I)? The man replies: You are not just a wife; you are also like another mother to me. Seriously?
Returning to all the violence that Baby John foists upon us, there is admittedly no dearth of fire in the film but it runs very low on genuine power because nothing that it delivers has the potential to catch the audience by surprise.
The key characters in Baby John are all of the stock variety So, the actors can do only so much and no more. DCP Satya Verma is the Alpha male, single father to a five-year-old schoolgirl, Khushi (Zara Zyanna). She has inherited her father's spunky streak but Satya, now living incognito in Alappuzha, Kerala, as an ordinary bakery owner, has abandoned his old methods of punishing criminals.
Jackie Shroff dons the garb of a ruthless politician and human trafficker, Nanaji, who encourages his only son to ride roughshod over all and sundry. The first time we see the villain, he cracks open a gang member's skull. The dead man is given an unceremonious burial. We know exactly what to expect from him when Satya gets in his way.
The ageing bad man's paternal indulgence leads to his son getting into the crosshairs of the protagonist, a guy who pulls out the stops when provoked. The errant boy falls victim to the policeman's decision to dispense instant justice.
To establish how much a man of action the crusading cop is, the screenplay makes space for a sequence in which the hero switches on a song on his car audio system and tells his mom (Sheeba Chaddha) that he will tackle a gangster and his men in the middle of Mumbai's traffic and return before the number is over. He does just that without breaking a sweat.
After being beaten into submission by Satya, the bad guy, Nanaji, and his henchmen, including corrupt police officer Baldev Patil (Zakir Hussain) and exploitative builder Bhima Rane (Shrikant Yadav), swear vengeance.
The revenge is swift. forcing Satya Verma to fake his death and vanishing from the public eye. He settles into a peaceful new life and devotes all his waking hours to raising his daughter.
Six years on, at his daughter's school, where the little girl is never on time for no fault of her own, Satya meets her class teacher Tara (Wamiqa Gabbi). By the time the film circles back to this point after wending its way through a long, sluggish flashback, Satya and Tara become friends and accomplices and not with benefits, not as yet at any rate.
Vijay fans who have seen and loved Theri and know the film backwards would be aware what Baby John is all about, give or take a few minor tweaks devised in the remake to set up the prospect of an undercover cop universe that might include a woman in uniform who hides her identity to serve the greater public good.
A Bollywood A-lister makes an appearance in the final sequence of the film and joins Baby John aka Satya Varma in wishing the audience Merry Christmas and for all the other festivals that Indians celebrate. Trouble is that Baby John falls way, way short of working action movie fans up into a celebratory frenzy.
Not that it does not try. But all its vim and vigour, delivered in the form of noisy, overwrought driblets over a running time of two hours and forty minutes, come to naught.
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Varun Dhawan, Wamiqa Gabbi, Salman Khan, Keerthy Suresh
