Rishi is excellent in this AB hamfest

Director Umesh Shukla’s 102 Not Out, based on a Gujarati play by Saumya Joshi with the same title, has tried to bring some weight and substance to its proceedings by casting Amitabh Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor in the two lead roles.

Mr Bachchan and Mr Kapoor are old screen-mates. They’ve played bada bhai-chhota bhai (Amar Akbar Anthony, Coolie), and stepdad-stepson (Kabhi Kabhie). Now they are cast as father, son.

But, as is the case with most plays in India that aim to entertain the entire joint family while leaving each member teary-eyed and pondering over a vignette of familial gyan, both their characters are exaggerations.

Not a bad thing in itself, but if farfetched characters are played with unchecked, amplified boisterousness, the caricature leaves you feeling gypped.

The saving grace here is that while one of the two biggies does that, the other is nicely in character, in control. A sutradhar’s voice (Vijay Raaz) introduces to us the setting, main characters and their key traits.

There’s a father, Dattatraya Vakharia (Amitabh Bachchan), who is 102 years old and yet takes rickety auto rides because he likes chatting with the autowala. His normal state of being is to smooch out every bit of fun from life every second of the day.

Inside his large Shanti Mansion in Vile Parle, Babulal Vakharia (Rishi Kapoor) drags his feet around, up and down in a depressing, robotic monotony to ensure the geyser is off, the water pump switched off.

Babulal is Dattatraya’s 75-yearold son who lives with a perpetual scowl at the stuff around him as well as inside his head.

Close at hand, always, is Dhiru (Jimit Trivedi), a sweet minioncum-pal of Dattatraya. He is employed as a compounder at the local chemist shop but likes to hang around their house.

Dattatraya and Babulal operate like an aged couple trying to keep to their space to avoid conflict — so the junglee manabout-town has his own, separate refrigerator that’s stocked with happy pastries, while the sulky, sanki one makes daily visits to the doctor.

Packed in this too-cutesy-for-words scenario is a life lesson that Indian parents do not seem to want to learn: If your bachcha turns out to be nalayak, admit it, don’t cling to hope, move on without signing off your life and property to them. O ne day Dattatraya drags in a cut out and announces that he is going to beat the record of the Chinese man who lived till the age of 118. But for this he needs happy people around him, and so Babulal will have to go.

He threatens the unthinkable. And Babulal, too used to his sad routine and stuff, pleads. Dattatraya relents, but lays down many conditions — some of them rather silly, pointless and boring, some of them poignant and life-altering for Babulal.

It’s choo chweet a premise with a purpose so senti — Dattatraya wants to inject life back into his son. He wants him to learn to live once again, and not to die before he actually dies. 1 02 Not Out assumes a flippant tone and style because it doesn’t want us to get all depressed and morose about children who grow up into selfish, crappy human beings.

Problem is that while the plot is simple, the space in which it plays out is made up of annoying, airy-fairy details.

The house terrace is like a little room in the sky full of lit candles, and on their little street corner people walk as if they are starring in their own slo-mo dancedream sequence while being serenaded by a man playing the saxophone. Bizarre, much.

Also, the film doesn’t trust our intelligence. It thinks our collective IQ is in single digits and so, after playing out a funny scenario, cracking a joke, it pauses to explain in detail the joke it has cracked.

But we go along since the longlimbed Bachchan Saab is the one guiding and goading action with warmth, eyes that are deep wells of wisdom, and light, loose talk. Sadly, there’s much hamming to contend with.

AB is all over the place, flitting in and out of character, except when he’s not.

He creates his character from gestures and laugh so big and bold when a little less would have been better, more memorable. Rishi Kapoor is excellent. As a crunched up, irritated man, he uses his body and silence to communicate a lot. Kapoor doesn’t upstage Bachchan. He doesn’t

need to. He gently chided his overacting with his controlled, measured performance.

Dattatraya (Amitabh Bachchan) and Babulal (Rishi Kapoor) operate like an aged couple trying to keep to their space to avoid conflict — so the

junglee man-about-town has his own, separate refrigerator that’s stocked with happy pastries, while the sulky, sanki one makes daily visits to the doctor

A B is now 75 years of age. And his ability to connect with us is still, shockingly, as strong as it once was.

But these days, like a nervous salesman unsure of himself and his wares, AB tries to pander, to give us what he thinks we like.

Here, in between his over-the-top performance, he suddenly reaches out to us by throwing in a few carefully calibrated power moments.

These brief, fleeting moments give us a glimpse of the actor he once was. And we smile, knowing that he still has it in him to give many of us goosebumps, bring tears to our eyes, or just rile us up about someone, something.

None of these moments are necessary to the characters he is playing. These are cheap tricks to connect, to send us off happy.

Of course these moments owe their power to the fact that many of us grew up with him and our love affair, which has lasted more than 40 years, has weathered that toofani decade of Ganga, Jamuna…, Jadugar, Ajooba...

We are well trained to read the smallest of his gestures — in his deadpan, droopy-eyed gaze we sense an exciting pause before a storm, the tightness of his jaw is a call for action...

But these days, when we watch him trying to please us, we also sense dishonesty, we feel shortchanged. To watch him dishonour his own talent and legacy makes us shamefaced.

Yet, many of us can’t reject him. Because that would mean rejecting our own past, our growing up, admitting that the fire in the belly we knew we had at one point in time was never really there.

That’s why many of us still carry, rolled under our armpit, an “AB the Greatest” jhanda. We are waiting for him to give us an occasion to whip it out and wave it again. Because we worry that this generation, which swoons over Ranbir and Ranveer, will never know what we experienced. Because we worry that when they look at AB these days, they say, “Khandar dekh ke lagta hai ki imaarat kabhi buland thi”.

Mr Bachchan needs to give them a glimpse of that imposing imaarat where many of us still dwell, in hope.

AB is all over the place, flitting in and out of character, except when he’s not. He creates his character from gestures and laugh so big and bold when a little less would have been better, more memorable. Rishi Kapoor is excellent. He doesn’t upstage Bachchan. He doesn’t need to. He gently chided his overacting with his controlled, measured performance.