A waste of time and talent
MANIESH PAUL IS BAA BAA, A YOUNG MAN IN LOVE WITH AN ART TEACHER’S DAUGHTER. ANUPAM KHER IS HIS DAD, A HENPECKED CASHEW TRADER BY DAY
If it’s a Bollywood film set in Goa, there must be drugs, corrupt politicians and models exploiting each other. Baa Baaa Black Sheep could have been different. It must have seemed so brilliant on paper — a thriller peppered with crisp humour, taut with suspense.
By the time debutante director Vishwas Paandya is done with it, it is a parody of all it could have been, a waste of serious actors, neither funny nor thrilling.
Maniesh Paul is Baa Baa, a young man in love with an art teacher’s daughter.
Anupam Kher is his Dad, a henpecked cashew trader by day and a sharpshooting contract killer by night.
The art teacher (Annu Kapoor) also creates and deals in counterfeit art.
We meet politicians handin-glove with drug dealers, stereotypical bad buys, mercenaries galore.
Anupam Kher yearns for his son to take up the family business — not the cashews but the contract killing.
Anupam Kher uses all the tactics parents usually deploy in such a case — suicide threats, emotional blackmail and also here the threat of him being eliminated by others in the business.
The boy gives in, only to be caught in a ‘dharam sankat’ — he gets a twisted contract to kill people he knows and needs to figure out what is behind it, since his family follows a policy of never killing an innocent.
What could have been a rich plot is let down by seriously sup-bar humour.
So you get jokes like, “Mai JNU student reh chuka hoon, mai chup nahi reh sakta” and “Galti wo hoti hai jo sudhaari ja sake. Jo jhelni pade, use beemari kehte hain.” It is tragic to see actors of the caliber of Kher, Kay Kay Menon and Kapoor so wasted.
This is happening far too often; it’s just not funny anymore.