Delhi has two new swindlers. They can do anything and they can get away with anything.

Businessmen, politicians, the Income Tax department – they spare no one. The country is in their palms, it is their prosperity and their destiny.

When the media reports on them, it sounds impressed, not alarmed. I’m not sure who you’ve in mind, but I’m referring to Yash Raj Films’ latest, Bunty Aur Babli 2.

A ‘spiritual’ sequel to the 2005 Shaad Ali directorial, it features a new set of con artists, Kunal (Siddhant Chaturvedi) and Sonia (Sharvari Wagh), who use the legendary “brand name,” ‘Bunty aur Babli’.

The original tricksters, Bunty 1 (Saif Ali Khan) and Babli 1 (Rani Mukerji), have resigned to mundane domesticity, in Phursatganj. Bunty 1 works as a ticket collector at the local railway station; Babli 1 is a housewife. But Kunal and Sonia, or Bunty 2 and Babli 2, are living a charmed life, having stolen Rs 200 crores in their latest heist.

The cop Jatayu Singh (Pankaj Tripathi) gives the old couple a new thrill: follow and nab their namesakes.

Directed and written by Varun Sharma, Bunty Aur Babli 2 misfires right from the opening credits, where Tripathi’s tepid voiceover – replacing Amitabh Bachchan in the first version – introduces the story.

More voiceover follows, Chaturvedi detailing the duo’s past – Bunty 2 and Babli 2, engineering graduates from a Ghaziabad college, have remained unemployed for three years – that functions as a lazy substitute for revealing characters through dialogues, scenes, and subplots.

The writing has no sophistication: Bunty 2 and Babli 2 are sharp; the businessmen, politicians, and the Income Tax officers dumb and also loud and sleazy. Their cons’ mechanics are so stale and absurd and inane that they stink.

Wagh and Chaturvedi leave no impression; they’re not incompetent, but ineffectual, content to absorb the pedestrian writing.

Khan should just drop the pretense of hinterland accents and roles, because they expose his limitations. (He bungled a similar role, in Bhoot Police, two months ago.) His diction is laboured, his mannerisms inauthentic.  He is just incompetent. The result is a city slicker, fed on a diet of exotic Bollywood films, trying to ‘imagine’ hinterland India.

When Khan is not mediocre, he’s embarrassing. Mukerji isn’t as bad, but she tries hard – very hard – to be funny. Even Tripathi struggles. What does it say about a film where the only notable performance comes from a kid (Bunty 1 and Babli 1’s wily son)? I don’t know – maybe the future, if not the present, of the Hindi film industry is bright?

This is such an indifferent production that even its soundtrack fails to provide respite. Like everything else, the songs are forgettable – one of them is used as a filler. But the biggest problem is the lack of screenwriting momentum. Before the interval, Bunty 2 and Babli 2 flit from one dull robbery to another – they face no opposition and they lack an overarching plan – making the film as directionless as them.

By the time Jatayu asks Bunty 1 and Babli 1 for help almost an hour has passed. It gets worse, because the film manufactures a motivation for them; Jatayu’s parallel secret plan is even more illogical. But the second half at least tries; the makers manage to stitch together some shreds of story and conflict – a lunge so rare that it seems philanthropic.  

Bunty Aur Babli was remarkable at a conceptual level, because it was one of the first big budget Bollywood films to debunk the smugness and self-deception of a post-liberalised country. It showed, via impressive humour and restraint, that “India Shining” was a star in a different galaxy – that in the revamped booming economy and exacerbating income inequality, the lots of Buntys and Bablis would not improve; that they were the eternal ‘pizza delivery’ people in the land of new excess: They could smell it but not eat it.

The only solution? Beating rich people at their own game.

Its sequel, however, has a dim political consciousness. We do get a nice small scene where, after their second robbery, Bunty 2 and Babli 2 look at the scores of white-collared workers exiting a glassy high-rise. “Wasn’t this our dream?” He tells her. “A nine-to-five job, a multinational company, a suit and tie.”

Distilling the context of unprecedented unemployment levels, this moment is a rare example of Bunty Aur Babli 2 trying to find its core. But the rest of the film lacks this awareness, except one scene in the climax. But this time, Chaturvedi delivers a long sermon that seems like a last-minute damage control. The young dejected dreamers of our country not just need better leaders but also better filmmakers.  

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