Review: Baby

Baybee! You Are Exhaustive And Exhausting!
But Whattay Fake Mooch!

3 stars

Mini Review:

It's a fight between Big Beard and Slim Mooch. Tense, annoying, exhausting, thrilling, fun, interesting, predictable. Beard loses, Mooch wins. And you come out having aged. Horribly. 

Main Review:

It is written. This triumph of the fake Mooch. It boldly goes where many Bollywood movies have gone before, seeking out meaner and meaner bearded terrorists, boldly traversing the known universe of hate at warp-the-audience's-mind speed. You may like it or hate it, but it keeps your attention.

Starship Baby is commanded by Captain Shredded Scotchbrite Slim Mooch, and ably assisted by Hairpiece and Small Beard (and Muscle) while reporting to a 'Head' that is fittingly bald. They all have moochs to remind us what side they are on.

The rule of the movie is clear. Anyone without facial furniture is going to be blown up by a bomb or die horribly. 

They make poor Tawde shave off his mooch so that his death can be explained off to the follicular police! Clean shaven Jamal who should have had a beard dies horribly. So does the color lens wearing slow-moving Bilal (clean shaven again)... 

Everything proceeds according to the Bible of Cliches for Terrorists & Cops Movies:

1. The politicians in a wood paneled office are skeptical about the operations of the Mooch unit. 

2. Big Beard makes anti mooch speeches from a place titled: 'Somewhere in the border area' to his bearded followers. (No, the orange beards are definitely not enthusiastic BJP workers). 

3. The city of Istanbul, Middle East Resort and Kathmandu are shown how far Slim Mooch will travel to find Big Beard.

You only wish, that the movie had been true to its bible and made sure that the annoying wife of Slim Mooch died horribly too. Had the audience been given guns instead of popcorn, at least 25% would have used it to kill her. The rest would have taken away her phone. 

But there is a redeemer for the Mooch troops who have no facial hair. Tapasi Pannu. She keeps your attention rivetted as she beats up a moochless-beardless baddie. 

4. And as is tradition, Slim Mooch will be injured and will bite the bullet like the Rambo that he is. Here Mooch gets stabbed in the hospital and we see blood oozing out of wound. But he's in the Middle East and the doctors possibly don't stitch up the patient by cauterizing wound with alcohol. But Slim Mooch is better than Rambo. He has medical supplies in his travel case. And Ray Bans to mask his pain.

Big Beard loses his facial hair and you are just told that he does horribly in some exotic land called Kashmir. You wonder why they did not kill him in Chennai, but you're distracted by someone sitting next to you texting their girlfriend, 'Killer movie hai!' 

Even though there are cool lines like (maarne ki) 'Aadat hai!', there are totally stupid characters like the Al Dera Cop which makes you want to stab yourself and die.

You know Murali Sharma gets slapped because he has no facial hair. And you also know that on the balcony he stares at Slim Mooch the way he does, because he's hoping the monkey who slaps Akshay Kumar in his moochless movies would appear and oblige him.

But Neeraj Pandey does have a knack of keeping you interested in this cliche ridden convoluted plot even though you check many times to see if your feet got nailed to the ground while you were watching Danny Denzongpa say 'plausible deniability' not once but several times... 


P.S.: For the women in the audience, there's a lad called Ashfaq who competes with Fawad Khan. He's got a beard, but he's really on Mooch's side...