Main Tera Hero review: Varun, Ileana's film is no fun

By Tanushree Bhasin I love David Dhawan films — well, most of them anyway — but the one that hits theatres this week is not one of them. He once was the king of comedy, teaming up with the hilarious Govinda to tell stories about love, class divides, pride and prejudices, always making them a delight to watch. His latest films however, seem to be grasping at straws to recreate what once was — failing miserably in the process. His latest offering, Main Tera Hero, should have been his son, Varun Dhawan’s debut film, since he hogs screen time like an insecure superstar. Except his skills don’t quite match up to the role cut out for him. He gets to do all the singing, dancing, dialogue_-baazi,_ fighting, and emotional drama but he doesn’t quite have a strong enough presence to match the claim the film’s title makes. Seenu (Varun Dhawan) is a college student who is more skilled at cracking lame jokes and punching goons than actually studying. He falls for Sunaina (Ileana D’Cruz) but a local policeman, Angad (Arunoday Singh) claims her for himself, pouring terror into the hearts of her parents and every other male student in college. Meanwhile Ayesha (Nargis Fakhri) falls for Seenu, forcing her father (Anupam Kher), who by the way is the “biggest drug lord in Asia and Africa” to kidnap Sunaina as a bargaining chip. Angad arrives soon to take his girlfriend back, but not until gangster dad has married his daughter to Seenu. In typical “brainless comedy film” style, all the action goes down in one posh mansion in a foreign country — this time in Bangkok (and no, penile jokes inspired by the country’s name are not spared.) [caption id=“attachment_1465207” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Varun Dhawan and Nargis Fakhri in the film. Image from IBN-Live[/caption] Barring a few one-liners that drew genuine laughter, the jokes are quite insipid. Shakti Kapoor makes a rather embarrassing cameo, as a low level goon who only speaks via film titles. The two ladies are quite forgettable — Ileana doesn’t even get her opening lines until well into the film. She makes googly eyes at our hero, her hair falling on her face fashionably, but doesn’t really say anything. Dating Seenu empowers her to speak up against a few college lechers and she lectures them about respecting women, only to have her lover call her a prepaid SIM card registered in another man’s name soon after. Bollywood seems to be saying, “Okay, so we can insert a bit of feminism, but in limited doses only.” The rest of the film looks like a haphazard stitching together of a few yawn worthy songs, conversations with God, and foolish plot twists reminiscent of the cringe worthy Singh is King (Are we now down to copying other Bollywood films? Seriously!) Angad’s character seems to undergo a dramatic unexplainable transformation post interval where from a menacing cop with anger management issues, he becomes a total duffer who couldn’t scare a baby if he tried. The end in such films is never really a mystery, it is how you get there that counts, and Main Tera Hero unfortunately takes a long, meandering, and utterly boring route to get to the climax we all saw coming two minutes into the film. Here’s hoping David Dhawan returns to form some day with a film that doesn’t quite gnaw at one’s brains as Main Tera Hero did. Tanushree Bhasin is a Delhi based journalist with a background in film-making and history.