review: Pyar Ka Punchnama 2

Dumb and Despicable Again

1 star


Mini Review:

3 dumb men fall in love with 3 despicable women who manipulate them and manipulate them and manipulate them and manipulate them and manipulate them and manipulate them until you wish they would end your misery by ending their relationships...


Main Review:

Your trying to extricate the last cookie from the jar and your hand gets stuck. Before you can ask for help by stepping out of the office pantry, the obnoxious gang that shares crude, misogynistic jokes *nudge, nudge, wink, wink* enters and infests the doorway sharing offensive 'jokes'. You can't possibly ask them for help, so you're stuck between a fridge that's emanating heat and a sink full of stinky coffee cups.

Watching Pyar Ka Punchnama 2 was an experience that is somewhat similar. Part one was funny up to a point (like the cookie you have your hands on) because it was refreshing to see how desperate young men get when they find love and want to keep it at all costs. This part just starts out to be offensive and stays there like a record stuck in a pro-dumb men/anti women track.

So this time too there are 3 dumb but happy men who share an apartment that has a pointless motorbike parked inside. 

They each meet despicable women who are 
one: dizzy and manipulative, 
two: avaricious and manipulative and 
three: manipulative twice over.

The 3 dumb but happy men are happy to be manipulated by these obviously manipulative women simply because they cannot believe their luck. They shop for the girls, they change their tv habits, their clothes, their eating habits, their lives while the girls blithely go about their own lives, promising much and giving nothing. The men look progressively miserable.

The funny bits come from the men realising that they've been had. So you laugh at their helplessness: the girls call them love names like 'go-go', ask them to 'record the cricket match and take me shopping instead', 'fix the printer', 'change facebook status'

But the manipulation and the misery goes on and on like a stuck record and after a while the funny jokes just become a plain anti-women tirade. And the funny frustrated speech in part one (most googled you tube video, methinks) repeated again just sounds tiresome and harpy-like. 

The men don't lose out completely. The girls put out and the three men do get something out of that holiday in Thailand (as they did in Goa in part 1), but they're back to square one again.

It takes another 45 minutes for the 3 dumb men to sort of get out of the clutches of these awful women. They look sadder than when they started. They look sadder because the good part of rom-coms is hope. And by making girls really nasty and the boys all good makes it impossible for the audience to step away from the movie happy. This is an anti rom-com. Maybe that's why the movie ends up leaving the audience feeling punched in the gut. And unhappily so.    


P.S. The star goes to Sunny Singh, who is the most understated of the lot.