Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety movie review: With all Pyaar Ka Punchnama faults and none of its jokes

Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety
Cast: Nushrat Barucha, Karthik Aryan, Sunny Singh
Director: Luv Ranjan
Rating: 1/5

Bollywood films often begin with a disclaimer where filmmakers claim the story and characters in the film have no connection with any real person or incidents. I sincerely wish the disclaimer is 100% true for Luv Ranjan’s Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety. For, here’s a young guy who has no clue what he wants in life, a childhood friend who turns into Lalita Pawar-style mom-in-law every time he spots a girl near his friend, and a woman who claims to be ‘chalu’ but does everything that suits the bahus of a Sooraj Barjatya film. Have you met or heard of similar characters in real life? At least I haven’t.

Luv Ranjan — of Pyaar Ka Punchnama fame — is back with his team of actors, Nushrat Bharucha, Kartik Aaryan and Sunny Singh, and a new film, Sonu Ki Titu Ki Sweety. It is the story of a girlfriend and a friend fighting over the ‘possession’ of a man. Yep, this would be perhaps the first misogynist attempt where even a man has been objectified in the process.

The film opens with Kartik aka Sonu delivering a Pyaar Ka Punchnama-style speech; only he is talking about the illogical demands of a client. We are soon told, through a few more similar throwbacks to Ranjan’s past films, that Sonu runs an event management company and his friend Titu (Sunny) is an idiot who hooks up with all the wrong girls and doesn’t even realise they are fooling him. He only has Sonu to save him from the assaults the womankind has decided to wreck on him.

Enter Sweety (Nushrat) via the arranged marriage route and Sonu’s life is shaken to the core. Not only is he insecure of ‘losing’ his friend, he even believes Sweety is too good to be true. While the character is unreal, the only mean thing she does in the entire movie is to tell Sonu that she is ‘chalu’. The filmmaker wants us to believe she is a good-digger, with the ‘gold-digger’ song playing in the background, but the story offers nothing to substantiate the claims.

From pulling an ex in the fight to manipulating family members, Sonu does everything you can imagine in a saas-bahu fight (or maybe watch in a TV serial) in his bid to separate Sweety from Titu.

Right from Sonu asking Titu to get a better cook or maid instead of getting married to Sweety to threatening her with false cases, the script and dialogues reek of misogyny that even the two Pyaar Ka Punchnama films couldn’t bring together.

If there’s one fresh or slightly entertaining thing in the film, it is the pairing of Alok Nath and Virendra Saxena. Alok Nath shuns his sanskari image and dons the avatar of a cool granddad. Though his dialogues are also gender-biased, the novelty of watching Alok Nath in a non-sanskari garb can be fun. Saxena plays Alok Nath’s old friend and even with limited dialogues, he manages to keep the sequences interesting with his restrained acting.

The one thing that worked for Pyaar Ka Punchnama films was the relatability, even if it was restricted to guys-only discussions. Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety doesn’t have that, nor is it funny.

The author tweets as @swetakaushal

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