'Carry On Jatta 2': A car wreck of a comedy (Movie review * 1/2)

"Carry On Jatta 2", Starring: Gippy Garewal, Sonam Bajwa, Binnu Dhillon; Directed by Smeep Kang; Rating: * 1/2.

Among the films released this week all over India in multiple languages it was the two films featuring the two Sonams that made the maximum money.

If Sonam Kapoor in "Veere di Wedding" is having a ball, Sonam Bajwa in the Punjabi "Carry On Jatta" is also in a festive mood. And how! Both the films have a lot of shor sharaaba and shaadi ka mahaul. But the similarities end there.

"Carry On Jatta 2" is an appalling piece of dumbed-down apology of a comedy. At the end this a car-wreck of a film, you look at the mess and ask, 'Okay, how bad is it?

And the answer is not encouraging at all. More frightening than this trashy film's abject mediocrity is its success. Audiences in Punjab and Delhi, I hear, are falling off their cushioned seats over the gags and jokes that a star of Gippy Garewal's stature shouldn't even contemplate let alone implement. But he, poor chap, tried playing the real-life soldier-hero Subedar Joginder Singh in his last film and his fans didn't appreciate Gippy's efforts at realism.

So here he is doing a 360-degree about-turn, going into the clutches of the crass where there is much green grass. Or, so it is believed. Gippy doing a boorish turn-around goes the whole hog. Crassness and buffoonery are the key to this kink-dumb. He plays a bloke so obsessed with going abroad that he will marry any woman who lives outside India.

Just why the Canadian hottie (Sonam Bajwa) would want to fall into this potty is beyond me. To each her own, I guess.

Most of the film is about the hero Jassi and his friend Goldie(Binnu Dhillon) fooling the hottie (Bajwa), incongruously restrained and dignified) into believing that Jassi has a large family behind him, just how a marriage based on such falsehood can ever be successful is something only the makers of this gag-a-minute guffaw-o-thon can answer.

Suffice it to say "Carry On Jatta 2" is louder brassier and more aggressively brainless than the first part. An assault on the senses the film insults every section of the viewer. At the very outset there is a sequence where Gurpreet Ghuggi tells an overweight lady, "You are not a doll, you are a dolphin."

While we figure out which species should feel more insulted, the women or the amphibians, there comes this classic of miracle healing where a hakim is shown pounding Binnu Dhillon's legs with a stick to cure him of temporary paralysis.

This is where I decided enough is enough. Just when you think regional cinema is coming into its own "Carry On Jatta 2" comes along to remind us that when it comes to the lowest common denominator what works is the crudity, dressed up as mass entertainment.

--IANS

skj/nv/bg