Jai Veeru Review

Veeru (Kumal Khemu) sells used cars for a living. He makes much more money than anyone else in the business due to his low prices, his friendly customer interaction and his quick delivery, and mostly since he's stolen the cars he's selling. One day he's trying to land a babe in a nightclub when 4 burly goons threaten to bash him up. Raged and infuriated by the insult in front of a woman, he does the most logical thing - he hides behind a much bigger man, Jai (Fardeen Khan).

Jai beats the guys up, and Veeru and he become fast pals and partners in crime. They slowly become inseparable - they eat together, they drink together, they sleep together, and they discuss how they want to settle down into an idyllic life with kids. You are starting to think that the recession must be seriously bad if a Sholay takeoff has to cut costs by eliminating heroines this way, when fortunately heroines do enter the movie.

Divya (Anjana Sukhani) emerges from the sea wearing just a swimsuit that she carries off quite well. Veeru however is someone who likes to break problems into their individual components, and so wants to see Divya and her swimsuit carrying themselves separately. However, as any man knows, getting to see a woman naked has a lot of unnecessary but unavoidable steps preceding it, and he steels himself into having plenty of coffee and meaningless conversations with her and marvelling at how their tastes match, earning the heartfelt sympathy of every man in the audience.

Unknown to him, however, trouble is brewing. Jai is actually an undercover cop using Veeru to get close to someone whose work is brutally murderous and someone whose thinking can result in the gory deaths of innumerable innocent people - no, not the scriptwriter of this movie, but Tejpal (Arbaaz Khan), a ruthless underworld don who Veeru works for. Tejpal's men however discover who he is, and in a gunfight, Jai gets shot in the head, and looks like he'll die any moment.

Most people in the theatre are feeling like that themselves by now, but unlike them, Jai recovers fairly quickly, thanks mostly to the efforts of Anna (Dia Mirza), a nurse who ends up as his lover, too. He sets off again in pursuit of Veeru, which leads to him landing in Bangkok, and you in a coma. Fortunately, the movie has a happy ending - everyone is happy that it ends.

Jai Veeru tries to be an amalgam of comedy, emotions and action, but ends up as horror. For starters, it is so slow in the first half, you keep rewinding your watch every few minutes so that you don't feel you are wasting your time. Then, there are the dialogues, which look like they were written by an 8-year-old when he was 5 years old. Indeed, you probably spent more time mulling over that sentence than you will on any line in this movie.

Then there are Bappa Lahiri's songs, which sound best when they're not being heard. The high-pitched vocals seem to drown out the music, there's hardly any music in the first place and... actually, looking for something wrong with the music is like looking for hay in a haystack. Sufi Tere Pyaar Main is an unlikely exception with some musical value.

Kunal Khemu looks like a good actor caught in a bad movie, and Fardeen Khan looks like a bad actor caught in a good movie. And for most audiences, Anjana Sukhani is just a figure caught in clothes. Dia Mirza's career deserves better stuff than this.

Watch Jai Veeru in a theatre - you will have to, since even the piracy industry is unlikely to be interested in this.