‘Baby John’ Movie Review: A weapon of mass-movie destruction

Director: Kalees 
Writers: Atlee, Kalees, Sumit Arora 
Cast: Varun Dhawan, Keerthy Suresh, Wamiqa Gabbi, Jackie Shroff, Rajpal Yadav, Zara Zyanna, Sheeba Chaddha 

Watching a mass actioner is a bit like watching West Indies play T20 cricket. When it comes off, there’s no better sight in sports. It’s all fireworks and fury, natural showmanship and musical rhythm. It makes no sense, yet the joy is real. But when it doesn’t come off, it can look like one giant Steve Smith mishit: ugly, awkward, strange, abnormal. Baby John is an example. Nothing aligns. The timing is woefully off, the star wattage is awry, the sound mix is all over the place, the action is unimaginative, it’s 164 minutes of dated narrative tropes, and the money shots don’t add up. That’s the thing about the genre: it’s boom or bust. It’s high-risk, high-reward, high-everything filmmaking. West Indies either chases down 250 or gets skittled out for 45 — there is seldom an in-between version.

Also Read | The 5 Best Performances of Varun Dhawan, Ranked

A remake of Atlee’s Vijay-starring Tamil hit Theri (2016), Kalees’ Baby John unfolds like a demonic offspring of Jawan, Badlapur and every second 1990s Bollywood revenge drama (often featuring Sunil Shetty or Akshay Kumar). I know an offspring can only come from two entities, but allow me some creative liberty; it’s the least you can do on Christmas morning. The film opens somewhere in Kerala, where a peace-loving single dad suspiciously named Baby John (Varun Dhawan) — he has a beard, which means he has a traumatic past — runs a suspiciously-named restaurant called Toast on Coast and lives with his six-year-old daughter, Khushi (Zara Zyanna). As oversmart kids in movies mostly do, Khushi speaks too much. She obviously refers to her father as “Baby,” which is not creepy at all. This setup is an endless montage of typically cloying and cutesy sequences. Khushi’s teacher, Tara (Wamiqa Gabbi), is intrigued by them, while a gang of teen-trafficking baddies taunt Baby (without singing “Hit Me Baby One More Time”) only so that his hidden identity is explosively revealed: Baby John is actually Satya Verma, a former Mumbai supercop presumed dead by his former enemies. His inner John Wick springs out; his bloodlust makes a comeback.

The two other protagonists, Center Fresh and Astral Pipe hoardings, make their presence felt in these set pieces. Product placement is a necessary sin in most big-budget productions, but this is on par with Coca Cola and Pass Pass in Yaadein (2001). If you look closely, the rain in these shots do wonders for the Center Fresh mint/water ethos. Through Tara’s eyes, the film goes into flashback mode: a clean-shaven Satya is the Singham of the city, but also a goofy bachelor who falls for a heart surgeon named Meera (Keerthy Suresh) while drinking Frooti. The Astral pipes are not pleased. When he crosses paths with a vile politician-gangster called Babbar Sher (Jackie Shroff), Baby John morphs into a cheap and exploitative rape-revenge thriller that positions men as the people most affected by such heinous crimes. It then exits the flashback and morphs into a distorted vigilante thriller, where Baby returns as Satya to wreak havoc on the monsters from his past. A superstar cameo at the end threatens the beginning of a franchise in which everyone is somehow a not-so-secret agent with a mission to bust human trafficking rackets.

Also Read | The 10 Best Hindi Performances of 2024, Ranked

You know how it goes. It’s not enough that a minor is kidnapped, assaulted and killed; she has to be seen, in agonising slow-mo, burning to death in front of a stunned Satya and her parents. It’s not enough that a bus full of school kids dives off a bridge into the river; Satya must rescue them and watch haplessly as they vomit, bleed and get defibrillated back to life. It’s not enough that a happy family is slaughtered in their happy home; they should be wearing white so that the blood shines, the villain must drag the torture on until the torture gets bored, and the dying woman must rescue her drowning baby and be told “You’re like my second mother” by her husband in her final breaths after she asks what kind of wife she is. It’s not enough that a cop is corrupt; he must be eating mutton biryani, chewing on the bones, and spitting out the rice onto the picture of a missing girl whose mother is weeping. It’s not enough that a builder is corrupt; he must stand over the dead bodies of impoverished workers, scoff and offer a chocolate bar to one of their kids so that the kid can then eat the same bar over his dead body in the not-too-distant future. It’s not enough that two men (one named Ram Sevak) get preachy monologues about the dangers of being a woman in this country; the film has to end with a slate that says “dedicated to all fathers”. You know how it goes, but sometimes you wish you didn’t.

The problem with movies like Baby John is that — like a majority of Indian mass entertainment — they rely solely on star power to plug the holes and hide the flimsiness of its formula. Screen presence and fan service are supposed to be the main attractions; the rest are just token social-drama fillers. In theory, Varun Dhawan always had the swag to pull off the Simmba-coded unserious action hero (his motto: “good vibes only”). But this is a film that fails to understand and channel his strengths. On the contrary, it’s built to spotlight the blinding gravity of a Vijay or a Salman Khan or a Shah Rukh Khan, not the elastic levity of a Ranveer Singh or a Varun Dhawan. It’s a grave mismatch, because mass hero Satya Verma seems to be a parody of mass hero Satya Verma; he has that Dhawan-style rakishness that leads rom-coms and slick actioners (like Citadel: Honey Bunny). Consequently, this film remains confused about how to stage him. The result is more Baby than John; there is nowhere to hide for a ridiculously obsolete story with no shield of superstardom.

Also Read | ‘Citadel: Honey Bunny’ Review: Will The Real Raj & DK Please Stand Up

Also, “built” is too generous a term. Baby John fails in the fundamentals of its own genre. For instance, when Satya returns as a vigilante with a hit-list, this entire portion unfolds as an impatient montage. I get the romantic portions and marriage-pregnancy-family progression reduced to montages, but isn’t revenge and social justice the (processed) meat of the story? What’s the point of a time-lapse here? It’s like the highlights package of a West Indies innings omitting out the boundaries. Not to mention the fact that the two evil sidekicks Satya kills methodically — one he literally haunts like a ghost in a children’s horror-comedy — barely appeared in the flashbacks. They were only ever seen in the background cackling around Babbar Sher, so there’s no sense of payoff.

There’s also not a single memorable action sequence, unless you consider a fluffy pencil penetrating one ear and exiting the other. The only solid punchline comes from Rajpal Yadav who, as Bollywood’s go-to comic, for once plays a dramatic role. That’s part of the joke. As Satya’s pensive constable, he gets a hero-intro fight moment followed by: “You know, comedy is serious business”. Having said that, it’s never a good sign when the meta side character gets the loudest cheer from the audience. It’s also never a good sign when a prolonged investigation sequence, in which a cop tracks down a missing girl by following a black stray dog’s scent, ends with you thinking: Black Dog, the canine and not the blended Scotch whisky. Center Fresh will be pleased.