‘Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai’ Movie Review: When Boomer Humour Fails To Go Woke

You know how, in the middle of a film, a character suddenly does something impulsive and exaggerated and totally out of whack, and you instantly realise it’s a dream sequence? It’s not a great gimmick and you can see through it, so when the character wakes up, you can’t help but accuse the movie of cheating. The whole of Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai feels like that dream sequence. Except nobody wakes up and it’s endless; there is no movie at all. Anything happens, anyone happens, every moment unfolds like an unhinged prank. It’s also the kind of hallucinatory dream one might have after drunkenly rewatching Biwi No. 1 (1999) in 2026 and wondering what an update would look like. The title of this film is a line from a ‘playful’ song sung by a naughty husband cheating on his traditional wife with a model: “if I’m young, I will love”. If I’m a man, I will stray.

Most David Dhawan comedies from the ‘90s might be problematic in hindsight, but many of us who grew up in the decade enjoyed the heck out of them. We loved watching Govinda and Salman Khan play the fool and do the silliest things, regardless of the sexist and classist storylines. Nobody knew any better; ignorance was bliss. That’s where the terms “leave your brains at home” and “stop over-analysing everything” originated from. Directors like Karan Johar and Sooraj Barjatya have tried to be self-reflexive and modify their family-coded themes from that era with films like Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahani and Uunchai; their work today is a dialogue with the past, reflecting a need to move with the times.

But the wokeness of a David Dhawan entertainer is a sight to behold: it’s a full-fledged argument and bargaining match with the past. It wants to commit but cannot, so settles for the best (or worst) of both worlds. It opens with divorce proceedings because the boyish husband, a wedding photographer, wants too much sex — without protection (one of the sponsors is a condom brand). So far, so painfully modern. But the idea of two-timing a wife or being in love with two women at the same time mutates into something ‘more’ here: our super-fertile husband gets two women pregnant at the same time. So far, so horrifically modern. He has to keep both a secret from each other: a complicated task that involves him hiring an exotic dancer (Mouni Roy) as his fake mother (the joke being: I asked for a Nirupa Roy and you got me a Mouni Roy) to keep the alibi going for his new girlfriend’s gangster brother. So far, so madly modern.

But you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. The funny part is that the boomer-core touches keep appearing like a jilted ex who refuses to accept heartbreak. The wokeness is forced to take a restraining order. So the hero, played by son Varun Dhawan (who visibly grew up on a staple of Biwi No. 1 reruns), is technically a Good Guy despite the plot. His condomless desires were because he wanted a baby with his ambitious-CEO wife (Mrunal Thakur), who dumped him for wanting to be a father and not for being a raging sex addict. That’s not all. Our man is technically not a cheater here, the same way Ross and Rachel were technically on a break. He falls for a new girl (Pooja Hegde) in London during his six-month separation period; a saucy hook-up is reframed as true love because he means well. It’s not his fault that his soon-to-be-ex-wife cancels the divorce and her feminism because she’s a few months pregnant (“I’ll work from home, I’ll manage!”), and then his girlfriend surprises him with a positive pregnancy test on the same day. No infidelity or bad intentions here. Look somewhere else (like 1999).

It’s almost like the film just isn’t wired to go fully liberal and anti-hero, so it makes a few ‘concessions’ for its six-pack-abs victim. This includes dancing on the UK streets to remixes of Chunari Chunari and the title song (if you’re wondering why Indian tourists embarrass themselves on foreign holidays), wanting to do right by both women to protect them from stress, making his best friend (Maniesh Paul, again) act gay to justify the presence of a purse in the apartment, and generally being a lovable buffoon whose toxicity is a genuine mistake. He’s an Ahuja (the surname of Govinda) too, so he means no harm. There’s a flurry of retro cameos to retain the Dhawanism (not the same as Darwinism): Chunky Panday, Manoj Pahwa, Rajpal Yadav, Johnny Lever and others. There are entirely mature gags like a wolf’s howl replacing the “hoon” when the hero (who acted in Bhediya) sings “Tera Hone Laga Hoon,” a doctor being insulted as “Galgotia University ke doctor,” a henchman saying “I’m a vegetarian but I smell something fishy,” or a dancer called “gold-digger with a figure”. If you laugh, it’s on you.

What Sadak 2 was to Alia Bhatt, Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai is to Varun Dhawan. Regrettable at best. You think it’s right down his alley, and you think it’s fun to get nostalgic about the comedies of that era, but there’s a reason those movies are better served as shy memories. Dhawan can still evoke a chuckle or two when he sticks to his own derivations — like putting on a perfectly stupid Scottish accent, or doing a John Cena out of nowhere to hide his face in the hospital (“You Can’t See Me”) — but too much of his performances in such movies stems from bedroom imitations and influences. We all used to do it back in the day, so watching his characters is like watching ourselves refuse to grow up by still mimicking those same stars. There has to be more to commercial Bollywood than Bollywood relentlessly reacting to itself and recycling its history as meta-Bollywood tributes for newer generations who need a break from cinema literacy. Can someone break the rearview mirror? And why should I leave my brains at home? The rents are high, cabs are expensive, so I’ll leave myself at home instead.