Leaked: This is what Salman Khan’s upcoming movie Punch looks like
Punch is a sequel to Bhai’s 2014 blockbuster Kick, but is a very movie
by Babu Moshoy
Film: Punch
Genre: Lies in the eyes of the beholder.
Producer: How does it matter?
Director: How does it matter?
Music Director: How does it matter?
Starring: Salman Khan, Isabel Khan, Randeep Hooda, Mithun Chakraborty.
Ratings: Stars in broad daylight.
For the uninitiated, Punch is a sequel to Salman Khan’s 2014 blockbuster Kick which earned more than India’s GDP that year but was still considered a flop by Bhai’s stratospheric standards.
Salman released Kick at the height of the 2014 soccer World Cup in Brazil and keeping with the tradition, Punch hits theatres the day parliament’s budget session starts.
Those who have seen Kick and lived to tell the tale might find the storyline eerily similar but here is an important distinction: unlike Kick, here Salman bashes up the baddies into a massive pulp using only hands. That explains the title.
Another difference is Salman sported a goatee in Kick whereas in Punch it is the goatee which sports Salman.
Here Salman plays Dev, a flawed do-gooder who bumps off anyone who fails to provide satisfactory answer to his blood-curdling question: “Penguin ho ya sanguine?”
Hooda plays lead villain Vicky, who cracks a cruel smile at Salman’s lady love and mutters: “A chicken in kitchen is worth two in mitten.” The line sounds more ominous since Hooda plays a strictly vegetarian villain who just can’t forget how Dev has made his life miserable.
Reared in an orthodox vegan family, Vicky betrays early signs of his moral turpitude when he starts sneaking shredded chicken into his friends’ vegetable sandwiches at a strictly vegan school. His confidence grows and he starts targeting his unsuspecting teachers who simply have no clue why the otherwise bland sandwiches their spouses packed everyday were suddenly tasting lip-smacking good.
Vicky’s luck, however, soon runs out and Dev catches him stuffing the stuff in the school Principal’s sandwich, which promptly results in six of the juiciest punches on Vicky’s back, accompanied by the standard murga punishment which is universally recognised as the biggest humiliation possible for any budding vegan. The subsequent decades fail to alleviate his pain and Vicky often wakes up at night in a pool of sweat emitting a series of cock-a-doodle-doos and an irrepressible urge to lay an egg.
Here Salman plays Dev, a flawed do-gooder who bumps off anyone who fails to provide satisfactory answer to his blood-curdling question: “Penguin ho ya sanguine?”
The delightful Isabel makes her Bollywood debut as Dev’s coy lady love Isha Behl. Bhai springs yet another heroine on us and stats suggest more heroines have been launched by Salman than satellites from Sriharikota.
An actress of suspected Indian origin, Isabel was brought up in the US and she speaks Hindi with a twang which, coupled with her economy of expressions, has prompted trade analysts to tip her as the next Bollywood queen.
Here Isabel plays a rural rocket scientist with droopy eyelids, soupy voice and a strange fear of pomegranates. Every time she meets Salman, she swings her pigtails and says, “Hand grenade se darr nahi lagta sahab. Pomegranate se lagta hain.”
She writes love letters to Salman in Braille, insisting love is blind and no other writing method can do justice to that sentiment. It, however, leads to some serious miscommunication. Handicapped by his lack of fluency in Braille, Salman reads Isa has seven ‘husbands’ when all she wrote in that letter was that she has seven ‘wristbands’. It leads to a temporary separation signalled by a high-pitch song with Isa blaming God for the almighty mix-up and virtually demanding His immediate sacking for such laxity.
To be fair to her, Isabel can’t even act pricey, let alone in a film, but is likely to escape unscathed as Punch is all about Salman and his daredevilry.
Dev grows up in an orphanage run by orphans who tell him his mother died a year before he was born after his unscrupulous father Mithun fell for another woman. In that orphanage, they don’t cook rajma as it contains ‘ma’ and they vow never to eat pita bread either even if they can afford it.
Dev eventually overcomes all odds, though there is not much clarity how, to fly on the rooftop of a Boeing 707, cross the Atlantic in a Hayabusa, overtake a Formula One car riding a horse topless (him, not the animal) before outrunning a bullet train to catch a fugitive Vicky in Russia.
A cornered Vicky takes advantage of the hero’s customary farewell harangue to mount a final assault but Mithun, who is quite popular in Russia and happened to be around to take a bullet, saves Salman, his estranged biological son he didn’t have a great chemistry with because of a bitter history and an unshared geography.
Best-selling writer Chetan Bhagat has written the script which polarises opinion with the reviewers believing: 1) It is so fine that it probably doesn’t exist; or 2) It has got more holes per inch than a slice of Swiss cheese.
It’s a film only Salman could pull off. Its brilliance transcends the stifling confinement of logic and encourages sanity to dig a comfortable hole and bury itself. It’s a film that has SUPERHIT written all over it. In braille.
P.S. Punch has been exempted from entertainment tax after 62 crore Salman Khan fans threatened to secede from India and apply to the United Nations for a separate country status.
The writer of this piece Babu Moshoy is a stereotypewriter. That’s what he is.