What  Is Kajol Doing In A Film As Silly As This?

VIP 2

Starring Kajol,Dhanush

Directed by Soundarya Rajnikanth

Rating:* ½ (1 and a half stars)

Confession time. I haven’t seen the first VIP film. And after seeing the followup I swear on my favourite Dada Kondke feature, I will never touch anything with a VIP in it…not even the suitcase.

More  confession. VIP 2 is not a film. It is an abomination.  It is 2 hours of excruciating self-promotion for Dhanush who  is an embarrassment  in this film. Dhanush plays the kind of larger-than-life bully-hero who looked ridiculous even back in the 1960s when Rajendra Kumar or Gemini Ganesan would saunter on to a sprawling set representing a well-to-do living room replete a spiralling stairway leading upstairs, and hug and kiss a woman 10 years younger  and say, “Maa, I’ve come first-class-first in class” (Please translate into Hindi/Tamil/Telugu/Bengali,etc).

Dhanush plays Raghuvaran a  first-class-first in everything, including male chauvinism and self-congratulation. He sings song’s  about his greatness with his buddies(terrible ones at that)  bullies his pretty wife(Amala Paul, grossly misused) and swigs his swag at the camera as  though it were a hungry leopard  in a zoo.

Then when he takes on a corporate head honcho played by the totally misused Kajol,  he takes on more than he can chew.Which is  okay because Dhanush’s character does exactly what the director is doing. Taking on more than can be handled, they both flounder and fall trembling to the ground.

Sondarya Rajnikanth is…I don’t know how  to say this  politely… not a director at all. To build on a confrontation between between Dhanush’s Raghuvaran and Kajol’s entrepreneur Vasundhara, Soundarya  uses tropes and clichés from old archival Rajnikanth starrers. These plot points would make even Rajini Sir  shudder in  disgust.

Not now, please. Not any more! Who behaves like  a Rajini spinoff treating women  with the courteous contempt we usually save up for bags filled with detonative dynamite

Kajol plays a  variation  of  Sridevi’s  snooty entrepreneur from Raj Kanwar’s Laadla where she would run her finger cross the bridge of her nose and bellow, ‘You  understand? You better  understand!’.

At least Sridevi had a formidable adversary in Anil Kapoor. In VIP2 Kajol’s confrontation sequences with Dhanush are so high-pitched and  hysterical that the verbal sparring threatens  to come apart at the seams to expose the hollowness of this film’s anarchic  gender war.

VIP 2  empowers mediocrity to the extent that it(mediocrity) seems the only natural status  to be attained in the course  of the  storytelling. Some day Kajol will show this film to her grand-kids as an example of how wrong a sensible seemingly intelligent professional’s judgement  can go when she is focusing on the zeroes on her paycheque.

You understand? You better understand!