Humpty Sharma ki Dulhania

Rakesh aka Humpty Sharma (Varun Dhawan) is a happy-go-lucky/good-for-nothing guy whose major aim in life is to booze and party. Kavya (Alia Bhatt) is a young and street-smart girl who lives in Ambala and is going to get married to an NRI (Siddharth Shukla) in 2 months’ time. Kavya goes on a trip to Delhi to buy a designer ghaghra and meets Humpty. After the initial fisticuffs love blooms and how but Kavya can’t marry Humpty because of her family and specially her dad (Ashutosh Rana) being against the concept of love marriage. Kavya comes back to Ambala but Humpty follows her determined to make her and her family change their minds and marry Kavya. How the remaining tamasha plays out and whether Humpty succeeds in his quest or not is what forms the crux of the storyline.

In a single line, Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania is a reimagining of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ) in a contemporary setting but with a less talented cast. From the poster, story, dialogue, characters etc everything screams at you about the DDLJ elements strewn throughout the film.

The first half of the film is so random that it feels like you are watching a moderately funny but mostly boring sitcom. Situations are thrown in without a care for logic and since it has to follow the DDLJ template there are not a lot of surprises. The second half restores some sanity to the story and also has funnier setups only to falter right at the climax and give an insanely cliched and totally contrived ending. Being in a contemporary setting you would hope that the film might give a novel spin to the theme and provides something more to chew on. Sadly, it turns out to be a damp squib with a few memorable laughs here and there.

Debutante writer-director Shashank Khaitan shows promise as far as setting up the scenes and situations are concerned and the re-imagination of a few characters are good but the content is absolutely meh for the most part. The only things that are worth taking away are the performances of the supporting cast in the form of the hilarious Sahil Vaid and Gaurav Pandey who play Poplu and Shonty, Humpty’s best friends and a performance filled with gravitas by Ashutosh Rana (albeit with an ill-fitting beard) as Kavya’s father. Varun Dhawan is filled with a lot of energy but he is no Shah Rukh Khan. His turn as Humpty at no point makes you want to root for him as most of us did for SRK in the original. Alia is again impressive though overtly chirpy and annoying at times in her role as Kavya. Siddharth Shukla debuts with this film and does not have much to do except walk around like a model which he does well.

The songs Main Tenu Samjhawan Ki and Saturday Saturday a do help make a boring a story look better. But all in all, Humpty Sharma is totally avoidable fare. Seriously, go watch DDLJ again instead.

Hindi, Romance, Color