Dream Girl 2 review: Ayushmann Khurrana walks the talk but can’t quite rescue a rudderless film

A still from Dream Girl 2.

"Ladki banne se zyada mushkil hota hai ladki hona," Karam, the gender-shifting protagonist says at one point in Dream Girl 2. It's maybe one of the few occasions when thisunsophisticated comedy actually talks about the social jeopardy attached to its premise. A premise that puts a man into a woman's clothes, behind her makeup but rarely into her unenviable metaphorical shoes.  From miming phone-sex in the first film, to actually dressing up to pass for a woman, Ayushmann Khurrana whol ly backs an idea that can’t quite do the same for him. Dream Girl2 has all the tropes of a silly, boisterous caper that fills in the gags column with a beefy, spectacular cast that could lift just about any material. Unfortunately, the rest of its ideational side-notes, squeezes in at the death as a hodgepodge of both motive and message. Ironically, it’s a body’s worth of a film, looking rather hopelessly for a soul to speak of.

Ayushmann Khurrana plays Karam , a local artist who participates in Agra's jagraatas. Karam is in love with Pari, played by a decent Ananya Pandey. His father, Jagjit, played by a scene-stealing Anu Kapoor is as barefaced in his desperation as his son. To pay off debts, and loans the two have taken in exchange for their degrading old house, Karam decides to become Pooja, a luscious bar dancer in the business of Sona Bhai, played by a typically erratic, and maybe a tad histrionic, Vijay Raaz. Push comes to shove when Karam is instigated by Pari's father to put together substantial money before asking for his daughter's hand. Because it’s that kind of film, the only alternative in sight, seems to be the most ludicrous one. Karam becomes Pooja, and thus begins a downpour of coincidences, errors and misinterpretations that doesn't as much as tell a story, as it traces punchlines, landing only intermittently on the roof of consciousness.

Set between Agra and Mathura, and directed by Raaj Shaandilyaa, Dream Girl2 has a skinless plot so bare-bones in its imagination, scenes practically bump into each other in the hope of developing an arterial connection. Karam's friend, Smiley (Manjot Singh), wants to marry his love interest Sakina, the daughter of a wealthy Muslim businessman, played by Paresh Rawal. As one of the many flimsy excuses to send Pooja, twirling into the arms of peril, Rawal’s patriarch figure also has a reclusive son in Abhishek Banerjee.

He is, we are told, in depression after going through a break-up; the cure to which, in all of its witless horror, is to pay Pooja to bring him out of his shell. This potentially hazardous misstep leads to an even crasser ruse as Pooja is asked to become his wife. All for money. Money that could mean the world to Karam’s own little galaxy of chaos; a galaxy that is bound to crash into the atmosphere his air of desperation has helped concoct. For every plunge that Karam takes, Pooja deals with the fallout through a palette of humour that though it tries to coax a levelling of the scales, guns at the woman, her sense of insecurity. The rudderless script is padded with cushy zingers like "Abu Daddy” and "Saste Humayun" that do little to salvage it’s rotten, at times, whimsy carcass.

Like the first film, a bunch of supporting actors, form a beeline for Pooja's attention. There is a bar owner, a bank agent, a dubious brother-in-law and an awkward aunt, played by the miscast Seema Pahwa. Multiple lines cross, as confusion and convenience deputize for narrative prudence. The gags fly, few land and move onto the next setup. It feels like a long-stretched theatrical sketch at times, intent on unfurling meta-punchlines rather than talk through the humanity of its characters. Some of them are, admittedly fun in a conspicuously forgettable kind of way. It’s almost like watching a skit from one of TV’s infamous comedy shows (Kapil Sharma is part of a punchline as well mind you), that tickle the ribs but rarely ascend to occupy the heart, let alone the mind. Even Sri Lanka’s economic woes make for a punchline, in writing that evidentially feels exhausted by the mandate of furiously showering and rinsing, the joke-box.

Dream Girl 2 is vapid in its conception, lax in its authority and disoriented as a narrative. It ends with a preachy lecture about love, but amounts to little more than a forgettable footnote that exposes its own hollow aspirations. There are enjoyable moments here, particularly in the mannerisms that Kapoor and Rajpal Yadav embody, but despite a perky Khurrana willing to walk and dress the talk, they all feel like appendages required for a celebratory voyage, that has no destination to speak of. You could split and slice it in vaguely informative ways but you much like the writers of this wasteful circus, can't quite venture anything remotely insightful. It can coax you to laugh, but can't quite convince you to care. In some sense then it might win, by losing.