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The first film, Ginny Weds Sunny, appeared on OTT. It wasn’t great but decent. The era being that of Covid, the producer chose to see only the fact that it was applauded in part and therefore decided to make a bigger sequel—for the big screen.
But then came the nitpick: so overconfident must the makers have been that no one worried about vetting the script once a debut-making director (as in the first film, whose title was sans any numerological tweak) was again signed, who also was the solo writer.
Signing an actor who had kept making a mark in web series (Avinash Tiwary) and an actress (Medha Shankr), who had a significant role in a sleeper hit (12th Fail), as lead players, the producer and director decided to cobble up an absurd story that finally does not send even any solid message, and whose Emotional Quotient and Entertainment Quotient are zilch too.
Sunny (Tiwary) is a pehelwan (wrestler), who aims to be a national champion. His dreams are slaughtered when he tries to prevent a lady pickpocket in a bus from licking someone’s wallet and she screams out that he is holding her hand to harass her. The video goes viral, see?
With education lacking, the video also fuddles any chances of a match for Sunny in the conservative region of Rishikesh in Uttarakhand. Daddy-o (Sudhir Pandey) decides on a “small lie” and inserts a matrimonial ad stating that his son is a highly-educated entrepreneur when he is now actually running a crafts shop.
The suckers who fall for the ad are Delhi-based conniving mother (Lillete Dubey) and her pub-hopping, short clothes-donning educated daughter Ginny (Medha Shankr). Ginny herself has had a broken engagement and several failed arranged matches behind her and mother also opts alsofor a “small lie” as Sunny’s ad demands a domesticated wife.
Since both Sunny and Ginny find no negative trait in each other, they get married, but soon, not only the lies get exposed, but also the video, and the cultural clashes, even in terms of their conjugal relationship. The two are now determined to divorce each other. But then, how will the title be justified? And so, we have an exceptionally absurd series of events to concoct a forced happy ending.
‘Writer-director’ (notice the inverted commas!) Prasshant Jha disperses with every logic, sense and respect for audience intelligence with his treatment of this saga, right from early on. The 134-minute saga seems at least thirty minutes longer and adding to the agony are the terrible songs and the straitjacketed performances. I pity the entire principal cast, except for the formidable Sudhir Pandey and Rohit Chaudhary, who plays Sunny’s tenant-cum-BFF. The two rise above the potty script.
Tiwary and Shankr seem helpless in their intellectually-deficient (because of the script!) characters. Lillette Dubey has a nonsensical role and Govind Namdeo is wasted. Vishwanath Chatterjee and Nayana Dixit as Sunny’s elder brother and sister-in-law are forced to overact. Gopi Bhalla, who did the hilarious English-spewing cop’s classic act in the two-decades old serial, FIR, is brought in just to reprise that act, that too without a single gem of a one-liner.
The Uttarakhand locales, ironically, are so good that the outdoors lend to superb cinematography (Archit Patel) but the music (by a bevy of songwriters and tune-suppliers) tread the ultimate heights of mediocrity and banality. Though the hero’s family is Chaturvedis from the holy town of Rishikesh, three (or is it four?) songs are in (the now senselessly-ubiquitous) Punjabi and one more refers to Khuda! In one of the addlepated sequences towards the climax, the couple visit a gurudwara. And then we have Sunny’s friend shown for no apparent reason as a Christian, who dreams of giving the IAS (Indian Administrative Services) examination but is reprimanded by Sunny each time for honestly self-assessing his lack of caliber! Some National (Dis)Integration, this!
And yes, we have seen climaxes of varied hues around stations and trains, but this time we have a laughably absurd spin on them.
I could go on…but I wasted time in watching this sad saga and will not do so in writing a longer review and testing the reader’s patience more as the film did mine.
Rating: *
Soundrya Production’ & Zee Studios’ Ginny Wedss Sunny 2 Produced by: Vinod Bachchan & Umesh Kumar Bansal Written & Directed by: Prasshant Jha Music: Heer, Amaan Noor, Usman Khan, Sushant-Shankar, Siddhant Kaushal & Haroon-Gavin Starring: Avinash Tiwary, Medha Shankr, Sudhir Pandey, Rohit Chaturvedi, Lillette Dubey, Nayani Dixit, Vishwanath Chatterjee, Govind Namdeo, Gopi Bhalla & others
