Picture this, a big fat Indian wedding and a modern day fable meets the flamboyant filmi trips of a Karan Johar romance. Picture this, four awesome people credited for writing a fantastic script like ‘Queen’ join hands again for a masala movie.
You would think these factors are quite impressive and would make the film a good entertainer right? Unfortunately the answer is no.
Despite having the masala concept, the teenager, young and flamboyant but insomniac guy meets girl plot, the Shahid Kapoor and Alia Bhatt starrer ‘Shaandaar’ fails to make an impact.
Vikas Bahl’s latest flick seems to just not have enough meat to make the grade as a substantial entertainer.
A blend of the mildly bizarre and the occasionally tender, Shaandaar revolves around an upcoming wedding in an English castle involving two declining business families whose last hope lies in this corporate merger in the guise of a matrimonial liaison.
Like most colour-spangled marriage ceremonies mounted on the big screen, this one, too, unleashes its share of glitzy chaos perpetrated by a bunch of eccentrics. Shaandaar sees a confluence of many influences, from the unreal, flashy worlds conjured up by the likes of Karan Johar (who is one of the producers) to the far more subdued depictions of human foibles of a Hrishikesh Mukherjee comedy.
Also on this amalgam is a clear Disney stamp, what with the animated passages that take the audience into the back stories of the principal characters with the aid of a voiceover narration by Naseeruddin Shah.
Shaandaar is the story of an orphan girl, Alia (Alia Bhatt), whose doting dad Vipin Arora (Pankaj Kapur), can do little to deflect the ignominies heaped upon her by a hateful grandmother (Sushma Seth) and a domineering mom.
The girl is an insomniac and spends all her waking hours wondering what it will take to rid her of her plight.
The answer arrives in the form of a suave wedding organiser, Jagjinder Joginder (Shahid Kapoor), who, too, spends sleepless nights.
The guy has been flown in to plan the wedding of Alia’s plumpish sister Isha (Sanah Kapoor), with the wayward brother of a golden gun-brandishing Sindhi tycoon (Sanjay Kapoor).
The tyrannical Arora matriarch throws her weight around but melts every time she is in the presence of Joginder. But Alia’s father is dead against his daughter’s growing fondness for the young man.
How the marriage and the other equations pan out in the course of the rituals is what the rest of Shaandaar is about. Not all of its twists and turns are convincing.
Shahid suffers from a badly-scripted character. He can be such a natural charmer, but here the charm offensive is not allowed to stop, and finally just overtakes him. It doesn’t help that he gets into a similar loop with the scenes he has with his real-life `papaji’, and there are several.
The hottie Shahid and bubbly Alia look good together, but there’s not very much to their characters else they manage between the two of them.
The only one character who leaves a mark in this crowded-yet-slack film is Sanah Kapur, the real-life half-sister of Shahid, who plays a bride being used as part of a ‘deal’ between two business families. She has a couple of strong scenes, and wears her weight well.
Overall, Shaandaar ends up being a confused mix of everything but nothing unique of its own to boast of.