Baar Baar Dekho: A patchy romance

Cast: Sidharth Malhotra, Katrina Kaif, Sarika, Ram Kapoor, Sayani Gupta

Rated: 5/10

Sidharth Malhotra and Katrina Kaif make for an unusualjodi alright. He underplays brilliantly. She is a wholesome package of beauty, song and dance. He is fair, tall and handsome and she a delightful bimbette on screen.

Together they could have woven quite a pulsating romance but thanks to modern vagaries of technology, they sadly get caught in futuristic concepts like time travel and lose the heartbeat in the needless and fruitless journeys back and forth, between 2016 and 2063 AD.

As a concept, it is quite Hollywood and modern. But in Indian circumstances and with a script which is neither entirely romantic nor entirely futuristic, Baar Baar Dekho is an unfleshed film mounted on the star value of its lead actors and producers, the producers being Karan Johar and Farhan Akhtar.

To show up the Math wizard Jai (Malhotra) as a complete loser unable to handle the math of any relationship is the biggest flaw in the film, moreso when even the patch-up efforts he launches in various time zones are so flat and half-baked that even his much-in-love wife Diya Kapoor (Kaif) brands him a no-gooder.

Kaif has gone on record saying she has given everything she could to the film and you kind of believe her. She looks stunning, she gyrates well to kala chashma, she is the aamsutra of the film. That’s all she can give as that’s all she has. But the big question is, to whom does she give all this oomph, especially with her husband not being interested in anything but his work. The only breaks he takes is to create babies with her and then not go with them to football matches in school!

No, just in case you thought, this one is a serious take on a marriage going all wrong, it is not even that. The miss-mash is prolonged and meaningless most of the time though the meaningless is veneered in a lot of chic production values and editing. Except for kala chashma which has become a party anthem, there is not much melody in the movie either. 

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 11 September, 2016