Jo Bole So Nihaal shows a rustic, boorish Jat chasing his chief adversary all the way from his village in Punjab to New York. What follows should have been a non-stop laugh riot.
Unfortunately, director Rahul Rawail seems to think a great idea is all that he needed to make his leading man rise and shine in a droll design.
Undoubtedly, Sunny Deol is in his element playing the dim-witted but street-wise Jat cop in New York, using his native cunning and his mother (Surekha Sikri’s) blessings to get the better of a cluster of New Yorkers, including a bunch of inept FBI guys who behave more like junior artistes in a skit on post-colonial vendetta than a satire on the Indian in “blunderland”.
And you really can’t blame Sunny for doing his act with less gusto than expected. The script and dialogue let him down most of the time.
Sanjay Chhel’s dialogues are surprisingly tepid. Newcomer Shilpi (playing an under-dressed FBI agent who keeps pulling the gun on Sunny with phallic aggression) growls menacingly when the jumping Jat calls her a ‘whore’. But not to worry. Nihal Singh just wants to use the Punjabi word ‘aur’ to rhyme with the word for a woman of easy virtue.
This is as funny as the dialogues get. Then, when you add the substantial fall in the humour level in the second half (with the exchange between a clownish Punjabi couple who lisp obscenities to each other, taking the amusement to rock-bottom status), you have one of the most unrealised and unfulfilled comedies in recent times.
Sure, Sunny makes you smile. His inherently artless technique of taking on crises in the solar plexus comes in handy in dealing with a situation that seems to be inspired by the Australian comedy Crocodile Dundee, at least in the way the rustic hero takes on the sophisticated metro.
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Sunny is there in almost every frame. He keeps giving the “gora-log” a mouthful. In a sense, his role as the turbaned terror-buster is an extension of what Sunny did in Gadar. Take the enemies on in their own domain and come home triumphant.
The formula is just not used to optimum advantage. Maybe the director needed to polish up his act better. Parts of the film are clumsily scripted and shot. Check out the sequences on the cruiser where Sunny pretends to be his own double to get the better of his adversary, who incidentally adds to the confusion by being dressed as a Sardarji.
The problem is, the comedy can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be a satire or slapstick. The narrative is finally much of neither. It all adds up to a whole lot of chaotic mayhem about gangsters and terrorists.
The simulated explosions in New York are laughably puny, and the songs are more catastrophic than 9/11. For a Sunny Deol vehicle, the film seems to resort to too many shortcuts, which give the end product a skittish and sloppy look. It’s a pity since you expected a Sunny Deol comedy to have more to offer than just a scattered smattering of laughter.
Sunny gets little support from the script or director. The latter, incidentally, is busy playing an actor. Rahul Rawail, as a grotesque gangster in sinister glasses, makes you wince. The rest of the actors, including the brilliant Surekha Sikri, who hams it to the hilt, follow suit. Sunny stands tall. But he is surrounded by creative midgets hiding behind watery mirth, which finally drowns the lead actor’s towering presence.
