‘Son of Sardaar 2’ Movie Review: Ajay Devgn Leads A Brain-Breaking Comedy

If aliens abduct me at the end of this week, I will have to be honest and tell them that the last film I watched featured Ajay Devgn dancing with his fingers, Sanjay Mishra casually strangling a cobra before flinging it aside (“go, get well soon, bye”) like it’s a daily routine, the camera entering the eyes of a high-on-poppy-seeds Sharat Saxena to reveal a party of dancing and turban-clad worms, Deepak Dobriyal playing a transwoman so convincingly that I had no idea he was in the film till 30 minutes in, a 70-something British pole dancer who dies while showcasing her talent (“who folded her body?”), Chunky Panday chanting “Pakistan, zindabad!” as a punchline in 2025, and Devgn pretending to be a colonel and narrating scenes from Border (1997) when asked to regale a family of Indian nationalists with anecdotes — where he switches between dialogue of Sunny Deol, Suniel Shetty and Jackie Shroff. The final straw for the aliens might be when they hear that the acronym of the title is SoS: a distress signal disguised as a movie. Just like that, I will be un-abducted.  

On a scale of 1 to Golmaal 10, Son of Sardaar 2 (yes, there was a first in 2012) is what happens when one of the Housefull instalments accidentally ingests muscle relaxants instead of vitamin pills. It is unhinged in a way that makes you laugh at yourself in disbelief for being broken by a comedy that blurs the lines between unintentional and intentional humour. The plot is lost long before it unfolds. Devgn reprises his role as Jassi (look at me sounding like I remember more than half a second from the first film), a gullible Sikh man who arrives in Scotland to be reunited with his long-distance wife (Neeru Bajwa) only for her to dump him for a seemingly mute and light-eyed man. I think. I can’t be sure of anything at this moment.  

So the abandoned Jassi finds himself becoming the 5th flatmate of a Pakistani song-and-dance troupe — Rabia (Mrunal Thakur), Mehwish (Kubbra Sait), Gul (Deepak Dobriyal) and young Saba (Roshni Walia) — who live on an Edinburgh street that looks like a rejected set of Rohit Shetty’s Cirkus (2022) and need him to perform the role of Saba’s ‘Indian’ father to fool the hyper-patriotic Punjabi family of her boyfriend. If the sentence felt too long, too bad, so is the film. The boyfriend’s family — led by a Pakistan-bashing dad Raja (Ravi Kishan), Raja’s two nincompoop brothers (played by Vindoo Dara Singh and the late Mukul Dev), and their randy old patriarch (Sharat Saxena) — keeps testing poor Jassi to check if he’s really a colonel. So you can imagine how many gags involve errant tanks, guns, mistaken identities, and actors parodying themselves without quite realising it.  

Like most comedies stranded between bad and so-bad-it’s-good, Son of Sardaar 2 refuses to comprehend the difference between emotions. Take out the background score, and an un-serious scene might instantly look serious. At one point, the hero’s ex-wife returns to reclaim him at a wedding, but the second he is torn between Rabia and the ex, a chandelier helpfully falls to get rid of her. I started chuckling in anticipation of a cartoonish sound cue, but to my shock, some sad-violin music implied that…this was an emotional moment? Did my mind miss a memo? Jassi is introduced in a song where he simply walks, poses and waves his hands; he is supposedly shaking a leg, but if this is shaking a leg, then I’m going to eat and call it breathing. I’ll adopt a dog and call him a rat; who’s to tell me otherwise? When Jassi and Rabia start romancing, they finger-dance (this is not an innuendo) in a cemetery where the ghosts of white people rise from their graves and finger-dance with them across the city. The likelihood of horror cinema banning ghosts as a narrative entity if they saw this is higher than that of Scotland banning Indian tourists if they saw this.  

Most of the actors — especially Dobriyal and Kishan — appear to be performing for a different genre altogether. Kishan is intense enough to be an Ashutosh Rana character without the self-awareness. The reason I couldn’t recognise Dobriyal for so long is because he plays a transwoman with the kind of poker-faced sincerity that belongs to a gritty gangster drama. His greatness almost disorients the viewer; he’s so committed to not hijacking the movie with physical antics that, for once, the low-key presence of such a character is normalised — and not mined — by a loud comedy. He’s just around, like anyone else, without attracting too much attention.  

Which brings me to one of life’s most pressing ironies. I’ve rarely seen a juvenile comedy so freely take aim at ‘sensitive’ issues like new-age jingoism, cross-border prejudice, Islamophobia, dysfunctional families, extramarital love, and divorce. Jassi himself behaves like he’s often spoofing Devgn’s renditions of self-serious patriots. Perhaps the courage stems from the Punjab-Pakistan link (as opposed to an India-Pakistan message), but it says something that a film as inane and farcical as SoS 2 is more progressive and less performative than a majority of mainstream Hindi cinema today. So what if it doesn’t know that it’s progressive? So what if it doesn’t know that it’s a film either? It’s like seeing a drowsy toddler inadvertently making sense because its brain isn’t developed enough to tell right from wrong. Or borders from crayon-induced doodles.