Batti Gul Meter Chalu Movie Reviews+Box office

Actual Rating - 1 Flickering Bulb that goes Phuss.

Tatti Gul...oops...I mean Batti Gul...(though that's a more befitting title of Shahid Kapoor's latest release), is a contrived, forced attempt to showcase the problem of power cuts and obnoxious bills that Indians in some part of the country face. Sorry that will be misleading. Because the film doesn't even talk about the issue, it just superficially touches upon it in the first half because the makers are too busy showcasing a weird love triangle, the absurdity of which makes Kim Kardashian and Rakhi Sawant look like the epitome of sanity.

Blowdried Curls Nauti (Shradha Kapoor) has two childhood friends, Sundar (Divyendu Sharma) and Sushil (Shahid Kapoor). She says and I kid you not, "Mujhe ladko ki kya zaroorat, mere pass toh dono hain, Sundar Sushil". And because years of friendship hasn't given her any insights into their personalities, she decides to date them for a week. It's like MTV Splitsvilla raised to the power of utter stupidity. So she sings a song with one for a week and observes the gentle behaviour of the other for another, and finally settles down for the good boy. Now, the differentiation between a good boy and bad boy is done smartly. The good boy rides a scooty, the bad boy rides a bike. So clever, right? Also some random things happen in the first half of the movie that really make no sense.

Sushil is an archer, no sorry, he is a lawyer who behaves like a conman. In one scene, in the dark of the night we see him participate in a competition where he shoots an arrow and hits the bull's eye. Then we learn he is a lawyer because the front wheel of his bike reads A D V O C A T E. But he behaves like a conman, extorting money from people in the name of law. You hope this will all eventually make sense in the second half of the film. And it does. Only if you are still breathing by the end of it.

If you thought, Sushil and his professionals were weird, meet his father, who wants to get married again and publishes a matrimony ad in the newspaper. And why is that? Because hashtag cheap laughs. Because hashtag random stuff. Because hashtag Hindi films.

Batti Gul...has some back story of some hefty bills that lead to a business fiasco and tragedy. And boy, people start acting out of character! The bad boy shows concern and Blowdried Curls sports unkempt hair, moist eyes sans makeup. Awww such grief. Bawl. And that's not all. There are sequences of bribery, charity and a revolution that's based on, hold your breath for this one, a viral video! Because hey, what are our lives if we don't exploit social media!

The film doesn't have characters. It has caricatures instead. Famous actors are forced to speak in a dialect they neither own nor feel. A weird accent runs through the film and everyone ends every sentence with ball'. As in power, not fun! Because we must not forget the film is all about power' play.
"Kya kar raha hain, ball?
"Bijli chali gayi, ball!
"Main tumse pyar karke thehri, ball.

If I made a dollar every time someone said the word ball, I would have had enough money to light up the entire village and solve all their Batti problems.

After the exhausting first half, one expects things will finally take off in the second half. But hey, that can wait. Instead, we move from one song to the other and then to yet another, till we have moaned and moaned and moaned some more for our friend who is dead. People mouth heavy duty dialogues, feeling all emotional and looking so contrived that it induces yawns amongst audiences and eventually a special kind of headache. It felt like mohalle ki ramleela. Sorry, that's not true. Mohalle ki ramleela was Oscar worthy in front of these cartoonish performances.

And then there is courtroom drama that body shames a lady advocate that finally leads to a speech on corruption that has the depth of a Chetan Bhagat book.

I constantly wished that Batti was Gull in the theatre with no meter to rescue. Alas, I had no such luck.

1/5

Lalita Nautiyal (Shraddha Kapoor), Sushil Kumar Pant, aka SK (Shahid Kapoor) and Tripathi (Divyendu Sharma) are childhood friends living in a small-town in Uttarakhand.

The movie kicks off with an archery competition where the prize is a free generator for the winning team's community hall for six months. That's how acute the problem of power outage is in this town.

SK is a lawyer who gets his degree after seven-and-a-half years and his business revolves around threatening and dragging local businesses to consumer courts. In the first half, SK is shown challenging the claims of a small tour operator and a biscuit manufacturer and extracting money from them. He believes that, "A successful lawyer is not the one who wins cases but the one who makes money," a mantra he is really proud of.

Tripathi is a small businessman who sets up a printing press. Things spiral down as the electricity supplier starts sending him inflated bills, accrued by faulty meters.

In a strange twist of events, Lalita, nicknamed Nauti, decides to date the boys for one week and choose one of them as her life partner in a fortnight! And that leads to a crack in their air-tight relationship.

Moments into the movie, you are put off by the seemingly 'Pahadi' singsong accent that the cast struggles with. Words like 'bal' and 'thahriya' are used at the end of every sentence.

The songs are mostly superfluous and don't do justice to Shahid's dance moves. Clearly, no thought has been given to the background score, which is random and jarring at most places.

Two narrators introduce the story to us, inspired by true events, switching from a colour to black and white mode but they just end up adding length to the film - which is long at over 2 hours 30 minutes.

The first half is set at a painful pace with characters like SK's elderly father, who runs a dharmashala, and is looking for a second wife, Tripathi's emotional family and Nauti's mother-grandmom duo, played by Supriya Pilgaonkar and Farida Jalal - the talented actors with no meat.

The film picks up post interval and is mostly a courtroom drama, where we see Yami Gautam make an entry as the lawyer representing the electricity supplier. The equally long second half has poor comic timing, a cricket-obsessed judge and a few sexist remarks by SK.

Shahid forcefully delivers a high-voltage performance that come across as gimmicky with an anti-establishment monologue thrown in, talking about the trials and tribulations of the common man, that falls flat. The courtroom drama also snowballs into a revolution of sorts at a national level that is too superficial for a film like Batti Gul Meter Chalu. Director Shree Narayan Singh, who gave us Toilet-Ek Prem Katha, fails to deliver here. You won't miss a thing if you give this movie a pass.

Stars: Shahid Kapoor, Shraddha Kapoor, Yami Gautam, Divyendu Sharma.

Director: Shree Narayan Singh

Rating: 1.5/5

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