The new Coolie No. 1 It is a bait, which I will not take. There won’t be a 3,000-word essay on how Govinda’s film is a cultural touchstone. Pawn No. 1 First it was a movie in Telugu, with Venkatesh and Tabu at the helm. David Dhawan’s 1995 Hindi remake was sweet and silly, but it didn’t matter. Govinda was then at the height of his comic powers; he just had to open his mouth and the audience would start laughing. Have you ever wondered how bad those Dhawan movies from the 90s would be without Govinda in them? Now you know.
If there was a Hindi movie star assembly kit, I imagine the result would look a lot like Varun Dhawan. He’s cheeky but not threatening, he has the right jaw and the right amount of abs, he can dance, clown, and fight. It has everything except personality, the one thing that Govinda, whose jaw didn’t cut through butter, had in abundance. It is shown in his repeated adoption of accents and characters throughout this film, now Bachchan, now Mithun. Govinda was such a unique being that it didn’t matter who he played: the character was Govinda. Dhawan is a blank slate looking for something to emulate.
David Dhawan, Varun’s father, resurrects his 1995 film almost scene by scene. Raju (Dhawan) is a coolie at a Mumbai train station. One day, a photograph of Sarah (Sara Ali Khan) comes into his hands and he is in love. As luck would have it, the person from whose hands the photograph flew is a matchmaker, Jai Kishen (Javed Jaffrey), who seeks revenge on Sarah’s status-obsessed father (Paresh Rawal) for rudely rejecting a boy who proposed to him. They conspire to pass off Raju as Raj, heir to a business empire. There is a lot of irony here, as Dhawan is kind of an offshoot, acting like a game of being poor, while Govinda was playing the same scenes as someone who came from very little making fun of the super rich.
Paresh Rawal is not a Kader Khan, but not to the extent that Farhad Samji is not a Kader Khan. Already used to Samji’s rhyming tendencies, I only flinched a little when Rawal exclaimed “Heaven on the docks, whiskey on the rocks.” This was followed a while later by “Heaven on the docks, the door (inaudible) has locks”; “Heaven on the docks, I am the lomdi and I am the fox ”(the fox is lomdi in Hindu); “Heaven on the docks, have you packed your little dresses?”, When he is pimp his other daughter with what he believes to be Raj’s identical twin. There are four more instances, once again with ‘dresses’ and the rest with ‘box’.
In one scene, Dhawan makes decent impressions of Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Ranveer Singh, and Amitabh Bachchan, and Jaffrey congratulates him. I wonder if Dhawan ever saw Timex Timepass or Videocon Flashback as a child, shows in which a fickle Jaffrey switched between characters and accents like a pan-Indian Robin Williams. He’s charming here, adopting a heavy voice, wig, and glasses to pose as Raj’s secretary. That the movie drops him in the last hour is insane and in keeping with the hundreds of inexplicable decisions that make up this children’s comedy. Let me finish by saying: for Christmas, I didn’t ask for Varun Dhawan in a pink nurse uniform saying, “Fucking cop, I like your cap.”
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