Review | 'Helmet' peddles soft propaganda on the hard subject of population control

(from left) Pranutan Bahl, Ashish Verma, Abhishek Banerjee and Aparshakti Khurana in 'Helmet'.

The average Indian man from a small town is too embarrassed to buy condoms, partly because the average medical store guy is like Shambhu in Helmet: someone who's known to the buyer and who might intentionally embarrass the already-hesitant customer.

Condom hesitancy is a big problem. But this film, directed by Satramm Ramani, is neither funny nor clever and certainly not quirky (as they claim!). By the end of one hour and forty minutes, you will wonder if there was a better way to educate the masses. But propaganda films rarely are, so you try to understand why filmmakers almost always choose small towns as a setting for such a ridiculously stretched premise.

Raj Nagar looks like Varanasi, but it doesn’t matter. Perennially sad Aparshakti Khurana plays Lucky, the ‘Kumar Sanu of Uttar Pradesh’: a singer in Guptaji’s wedding brass band. He’s in love with the flower decorator Rupali (Pranutan Behl). And no, this is where the similarity between the film and the super successful ‘Band Baaja Baraat’ (2010 film starring Ranveer Singh and Anushka Sharma) ends.

At the wedding, Rupali wants to ‘take their four-year relationship to the next level’. When she realises that Lucky does not have a condom, she sends him off to Shambhu’s medical store where Shambhu embarrasses Lucky by asking him loudly in front of his other customers if he wanted ‘Nirodh’ (the condom brand sold during Indira Gandhi’s Family Planning program). The clucking tongues and stares make Lucky come back with everything except condoms. Rupali tells him off and goes away in a huff after informing him that her dad wants to get her married off to some rich NRI.

Aparshakti Khurana plays Lucky, a wedding band singer.

The film is not even in its 20th minute (includes a forgettable song) and you see a pile up of cliches. Rupali’s dad insults Lucky and in a throwback to '70s films, proclaims that Lucky will sing and dance at Rupali’s wedding to the rich NRI who turns out to be a caricature. Guptaji ensures Lucky is not just out of a job but will not find another or be able to get a loan to start his own band.

If this doesn’t put you off, his hard-of-hearing friend will. Ashish Verma plays Minus, the hearing-impaired friend. The jokes on his impairment are so bad, you wish they’d just subtracted him from the get-rich-quick scheme to rob a truck filled with online deliveries.

The third person in the plan is Sultan (Abhishek Bannerjee, whom we loved as the scary silent killer in Paatal Lok). Here, the story is so pathetic, Abhishek Bannerjee gets to overact the ‘Gaadi hai, bungla hai’ dialogue from Deewar. Sultan owes money to a gangster, and he’s ready to join the plan. The trio end up robbing a truckful of condom cartons and now have no choice but to sell them.

They do manage to find interesting ways to sell prophylactics, but then they want to give employment to hundreds of youth from Uttar Pradesh who can sell condoms. Wait a minute, they just looted half a truck load. Where is this never ending supply coming from?

We get to hear a cringeworthy exposition about how prostitutes are an essential part of society and need to insist on condom usage because the men may go away at first but in the end come back to them. And how condoms prevent diseases (the gangster is suddenly reminded that he needs to act out an unnamed disease he’s caught because he did not use a condom).

Weary of this dreadful screen drama, you will be glad the three are caught and put in jail. But the filmmakers now try on another condom-related cliche: condoms prevent unwanted kids in orphanages who have no hope of being adopted.

Then you realise that Dino Morea has produced this film. Is this compensation for the cruel foreigner he plays in another series? Bollywood has certainly found strange new ways of appeasing the powers that be, and OTT platforms are happy to comply.