Movies can be forgettable for many reasons — objectively bad, boring, self-indulgent, long, unfunny, silly maybe. But Bhai Tera Star Hai is memorable for how forgettable it is. It is aggressively high on film-making and random chaos, like a dog on a deadly sugar rush after wolfing down hash brownies by mistake. I went in blind (my fault), and of all the things I expected it to be, the actual movie has absolutely nothing to do with the title. Given that it stars Raghav Juyal, you’d imagine this might be a high-pitched comedy that extends his scene-stealing Ba**ds of Bollywood performance and reframes him as the spoofy protagonist. But no. Not even close. Juyal is not only wasted, he is reduced to a hammy mess in a peculiar production that defies labels.
I will try to describe it. I’m sure the plotty madness is part of the design, but it’s a ridiculous 105-minute gag that does not land. For reasons that have nothing to do with the story, the whole film unfolds in London. It opens with struggling actor Ajay Singh summoned by pub owner and betting crook Fatty (Sanjay Kapoor). Ajay owes him ten thousand pounds; he has two hours to get the money. So Ajay begins his little hustle. Keep up with me now. Ajay lies about his sister Natasha (Parvathy Omanakuttan) being pregnant to fool his girlfriend Roshni (Niharika NM) into scraping together the cash for a fake abortion. Roshni in turn pretends to be pregnant so that her bartender brother Sid (Vivan Bhatena) goes around London collecting every penny he lent his friends. Sid is accompanied by a pal named Laila (Barkha Singh), who has feelings for him and wants to help him. Also Sid’s ex-girlfriend is Ajay’s sister Natasha.
The loop is not complete. Fatty himself needs the money because he’s in deep water with loan sharks. There is also a guy named JD (Vikalp Mehta), Fatty’s employee, who enlists his whiny girlfriend Chandni’s (Tina Desai) teen brother to wring some money out of Ajay. There’s also a cop named Hamid (Chandan Roy Sanyal) who gets pulled into this mess. I’m sure there are more pointless characters, one of whom is the film itself that owes its audience the princely sum of the ticket price.
I know what you’re thinking. How can a script like this possibly amount to anything? The movie seems to know that too. So it tries to hide the mediocrity of the writing behind the illusion of something slick and continuous and technically sophisticated. It has some distractingly long takes (some of which are cut and awkwardly stitched together) that pass the baton from one subplot to another in the same tracking shot, the weirdest visual transitions, ad-libbing actors and an endless score. It’s some of the tipsiest film-making I’ve seen in a while. Worse, it features cartoon-style thought bubbles, in-frame emojis, juvenile subtitles and sound effects. The treatment seems to be designed for infants who are still figuring out what a screen looks like. It’s almost embarrassing to watch, because you can sense the movie throwing everything at the wall in the name of commercial — or any — entertainment.
Ajay is allegedly the protagonist, even though the cast is large enough to swallow him whole. There is no conceivable reason for Ajay to be an over-the-top actor; it adds nothing, just like London and a screenplay that becomes an excuse for a midnight pub crawl. All it does is provide a showreel for Juyal, who mimics and dances and auditions and flaunts his love for Bollywood to his heart’s content. Never mind that Ajay is a terrible and deceitful person who is protected by the genre of the film. It ends with Ajay arbitrarily performing in two consecutive songs without any explanation. It’s all vibes. The other characters quickly reach resolutions, driven by budgetary constraints rather than an ounce of coherence. Most films contain a few gimmicks, but Bhai Tera Star Hai is a gimmick that contains no film. If you’re lucky, you might chuckle while the camera is rolling and every scene becomes a sum total of actors waiting for someone to call Cut.