Miffed with her husband, a young woman walks out of a dinner date, boards an auto-rickshaw and travels back home. The night is thick, and you see a shot of the driver eying her – the expensive outfit and jewellery; the designer purse. He veers off course on to a deserted road, ignoring her protests; and stops near a truck. There are a bunch of goons around.
What happens now? Will she be robbed? Raped? Murdered?
Of course not. Because she is Anjali Menon, whose husband Jai Mohan is the hero of the movie. She turns back and starts running away and bumps into her husband, who animatedly consoles her and beats up the goons.
*****
Joshiy’s Lailaa O Lailaa is composed of similar, clichéd instances. Promise a little, deceive much.
Lailaa O Lailaa has everything going for it on paper. A stellar cast – Mohanlal, Amala Paul, Sathyaraj and Ramya Nambeesan; music composed by the national award winner Gopisunder; and script by Suresh Nair, who wrote the Bollywood blockbuster Kahaani .
Yet it ends up a misfiring debacle.
The film is about an undercover agent Jai Mohan, whose professional life and personal life are at loggerheads. Jai’s job protocols – he works for the intelligence agency RAW – don’t let him reveal the true nature of his work to anyone, including his wife. So he pretends to be an executive at a fictitious company. Just like Arnold Schwarzenegger did in True Lies.
*****
Jai Mohan, a divorcee, sees Anjali Menon when she is singing a beautiful song while looking pretty; her hair flying in the wind.
He promptly falls for her.
She sees him playing with orphaned kids at a convent. Naturally. He has a heart of gold, obviously.
She promptly falls for him.
Then he retrieves her purse from a thief and hands it to her at her doorstep.
Her dad is a rich doctor. He opposes them getting together.
Yet they marry.
The amount of deep thought that must have gone into writing this segment boggles our mind.
*****
Jai’s boss at RAW – a suave looking Sathyaraj – warns him that married life is not going to be fun when you are a secret agent leading a double life. In a shocking twist, that is exactly what happens.
Anjali is exasperated as Jai has to attend to his professional duties even at midnight. And hen she starts stalking Jai in frustration, the plot goes astray. And just when you think the movie is about Jai’s double life, it shifts genres on us.
Enter a detained terrorist Victor Rana (Rahul Dev), and his entourage that includes a sexy looking model. They have some dangerous plans for Jai to foil. This is then duly followed by racy stunts, patriotic lines, a couple of James Bond-ish chase sequences and the obligatory bomb detonation scene.
*****
There are sexual innuendos and cheap jokes aplenty. Like when Jai says about a model, “Sir, she has no fuck in licks. O, sorry, No luck in flicks”.
That line is neither funny, nor does it make any sense. Just like the U certificate for the movie makes no sense. Try explaining that joke to your ten year old.
*****
The camerawork is adequate; the editing gimmicky. In one instance, you see a single, inconsequential dialogue composed of several shots. And the background music is often loud and shrill.
Recommended
Mohanlal does his role with ease. He convincingly performs dare-devil stunts (with a little help from a body double) and romances a confident looking Amala Paul who happens to be approximately half his age.
The first movie from the Joshiy-Mohanlal-Amala combination – Run Baby Run – was a blockbuster, thanks to a decent plot and a fine screenplay. Lailaa O Lailaa has a muddled screenplay that suffers from an identity crisis. It tries to be a romantic-drama and an action thriller, and does neither.
*****
The Lailaa O Lailaa review is a Silverscreen original article. It was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the movie. Silverscreen.in and its writers do not have an advertising relationship with movies that are reviewed on the site.