Review: A FLYING JATT

UDTA TIGER, BECHARA TIGER

1.5 stars

Mini Review:

A young lad becomes a superhero and defeats a big baddie and not only wins hearts but also the girl. Good plot, right? But it has been so needlessly Bollywoodised with a song and dance and everything seems to be happening so slowly you lose patience with it, despite some genuinely funny moments.

Main Review:

Almost fell off the theatre seat when you hear Amrita Singh (who plays the superhero’s mom) say, ‘Now that you are flying out, bring back veggies on your way back!’

Now that’s a quintessential Indian mom for you! And this film could have been full of such moments had they not constantly got lost in their attempt to be everything for everyone. The movie begins as though it were going to be Kung Fu Hustle, then it wants its hero to be Jackie Chan who plays the bumbling guy effortlessly. Then the film wants to get into the realm of being environmentally aware, so they introduce a bad guy who is polluting the city. Woah! A baddie who pollutes? That’s a great idea there!

But they cannot afford to have a baddie who only snarls, right? So they give him terrible, terrible dialog like, ‘I want a better costume than that guy!’

While you facepalm, you are grateful for the coffee cup in your hand.

The movie forgets that it has children to entertain and gets into Bollywood Booty dance numbers which are just plain ridiculous. Neither are the dances catchy nor the tunes memorable. What you want to see is the superhero face baddies in more innovative ways like Sunny Leone…

You start to lose interest when they introduce stupid things like Valentine’s Day events and forget to use what the film fraternity calls: a smoking gun. In fact, they forget about his weakness, that he has a fear of heights and then take the climax into space.

By the time the last big fight shows up, you don’t care whether Amrita Singh and Gaurav Pandey (last seen in Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania, he plays the superhero’s brother Rohit) are decent actors, you don’t care if Jacqueline Fernandez is as batty as a doorknob but has gorgeous legs, and you don’t want to smile at Kay Kay Menon’s I-just-put-my-finger-in-an-electrical-socket hair. You just want to get the whole superman turned preachy thing over and done with.

You do like the idea of the villain feeding off the pollution, and wish to put the odd grammar of the title ‘A Flying Jatt’ into the incinerator. You come away, wonder if there was going to be ‘A Swimming Jatt’, ‘A Diving Jatt’ in the future and are grateful that Jerry Siegel and Jerry Shuster did not call their character ‘A Superman’.

P.S. No mention of Tiger Shroff who plays the lead role? You feel sorry for the lad, that's why. He has these acrobatic and fighting skills, but he turns every movie into a cirque du solo... Bechara!

(this review appears on nowrunning dot com)