There’s a fine line between comedy that respects the intelligence of its audience and the kind that simply panders to it. Films driven by genuine wit have gradually become outliers in an industry where slapstick and chaos reign supreme. Son of Sardaar 2, a standalone sequel to the 2012 film Son of Sardaar, is the latest entrant in this long tradition.
Jaswinder Singh Randhawa (Ajay Devgn) is married to Dimple (Neeru Bajwa), who has moved to England for work. Due to visa issues, Jaswinder has been unable to visit her and continues to live in Punjab, cared for by his elderly mother (Dolly Ahluwalia). When his visa finally gets approved, he travels to England, only to be told by Dimple that she wants a divorce as she has a new boyfriend and wants to marry him. Heartbroken, Jaswinder takes shelter at a friend’s place, unwilling to return home and face his mother with the bad news. A month later, fate brings him into contact with a Pakistani woman named Rabia (Mrunal Thakur) and her group of friends. What follows is a string of misadventures as Jaswinder gets caught up in a series of unexpected, and supposedly hilarious, situations.
Son Of Sardaar 2, directed by Vijay Kumar Arora, arriving more than a decade after the original, does not so much continue a story as lazily rearrange its old furniture. The tone is juvenile, the emotional stakes undercooked, and what we get feels more like a frantic attempt to throw everything at the wall and hope something sticks. Amidst the noise lies a faint trace of a genuinely compelling dramatic core that fails to play out. In a more thoughtful script, this might have offered an opportunity to explore cross-border tenderness against the backdrop of inherited hostilities. But the writers, Jagdeep Singh Sidhu and Mohit Jain, seem more invested in one-liners and ‘Hindustan Zindabad’ sloganeering than in emotional complexity. Scenes pass like gusts of wind, just enough to keep the plot afloat, never enough to ruffle it meaningfully.
Rabia has a diverse group that includes Gul (Deepak Dobriyal), a trans woman who has undergone gender-affirming surgery, Mehwish (Kubbra Sait), a self-assured liberal woman, and Saba (Roshni Walia), a young girl in love with a Sikh boy. These women are from Pakistan and earn their livelihood by dancing at weddings in England. On paper, these characters offer some promise of delicate texture. But instead of exploring their inner lives, the film reduces them to sketch-thin sidekicks, their identities mined only for easy laughs or token sentiment. Barring Jaswinder’s mother, the portrayal of women across the board borders on the regressive. Their arcs are defined not by agency but by convenience.
In ensemble comedies, the climax often functions as a kind of orchestrated showdown. A crescendo of misunderstandings and mayhem that delivers genuine hilarity. But here, the attempt to raise the comic pitch feels clumsy and forced. Two long-absent characters are abruptly reintroduced, not for narrative resolution, but seemingly to amplify the chaos and pad the running time. The film also tries to insert a moment of moral reckoning with a bitter revelation that shatters the rigid worldview of Raja Singh (Ravi Kishan), a patriarch who believes he holds absolute sway over his family. But even this potentially meaningful arc is undone by a juvenile mode of execution, feeling more like a school play that is fatally lacking in sophistication.
Ajay Devgn shoulders much of the film’s weight, trying to bring comic timing to situations that are, at best, painfully laboured. Matching him in screen time, if not in finesse, is Ravi Kishan as Raja Singh, a character so exaggerated in gesture and delivery that it frequently tips into full-blown hamming. His brothers, Tony and Tittu, played by Mukul Dev and Vindu Dara Singh, respectively, are little more than caricatures. Mrunal Thakur, as Rabia, is reduced to a decorative presence. The scenes intended to evoke romantic or seductive tension between her and Devgn are awkward and flat, lacking any spark of chemistry whatsoever to hold them together. Deepak Dobriyal and Kubbra Sait, both capable actors, are saddled with underwritten roles that play more like missed opportunities than comic assets. Only Dolly Ahluwalia, as Jaswinder’s mother, manages to register with any emotional resonance. This, despite having barely three or four minutes of screen time. As for the rest of the ensemble, they blur into the background.
Aseem Bajaj’s cinematography serves largely as glossy packaging content to flatter locations and actors and little else. The background score by Amar Mohile and Salil Amrute drowns out any semblance of sound design, while the song-and-dance sequences arrive more like contractual obligations and function mostly as narrative padding. Only Ninad Khanolkar’s editing, by contrast, manages to bring a certain rhythm to the chaos, keeping the scenes afloat even when the writing lets them down.
Son Of Sardaar 2 remains stuck in shallow execution, offering little beyond surface-level chaos. There’s no escaping the lazy stereotypes, the simplistic moralising, and the reliance on dated formulas. Only for the despeate and die-hard viewer seeking a distraction that requires minimal emotional or intellectual investment, the film might, at best, pass muster.
Hindi, Comedy, Color