Lethargic storytelling kills the movie
JAB HARRY MET SEJAL Direction: Imtiaz Ali Actors: Shah Rukh Khan, Anushka Sharma Rating:
Shah Rukh Khan’s Harinder Singh aka Harry has a palpable, barely concealed frustration about him. Frequently in and out of relationships, he’s clearly running away from something. And he’s ended up in Amsterdam, with a career as a tour guide.
All good so far. Shah Rukh lets us into the character he’s crafted. There’s depth; there are layers.
Then he runs into Sejal Jhaveri (Anushka Sharma). She is part of one of his group tours, but then she loses her engagement ring and has to stay back to find it.
Her character is a compendium of clichés — she’s a talkative Gujarati woman who has had a sheltered existence and slowly begins to discover the world, wide-eyed, with the help of her new friend, whom she trusts unquestioningly, and whom she calls ‘Hairy’. Sejal is naïve bordering on silly, and this somehow endears her to Harry, who decides he must be her protector. “Tum us type ki ladki ho hi nahi,” is one of his highest compliments.
The slow build-up gives SRK sufficient time to showcase his skills as loverboy.
There’s a back-story too but it’s essentially a remix of director Imtiaz Ali’s earlier films.
From title to climax, everything screams ‘been there, done that’. And that is not typical of Imtiaz Ali. It’s like he doesn’t know where to take the story, and so it lurches from one song to the next, the screenplay feeling like it was reverse-engineered to lead into each jig.
There’s a terrible angle involving Chandan Roy Sanyal and his gang of unfunny migrants.
Anushka tries desperately to look cutely silly, even when mouthing lines like “Main waisi ladki nahi hoon jo apni engagement tod degi” and “Lonely feel nahi karna hai”. There is no subtlety here. There are some hummable tunes. All in all, it’s 143 minutes of lethargic storytelling.