Baby John Is The Worst Film Of The Year

LIKE ALL BAD FILMS, Kalees’ Baby John gets worse by the second. But like a special kind of bad film, the progression happens in leaps and bounds. If the first fifteen minutes are infuriating, half an hour later the film makes you question your life’s choices. By the time the first half closes, you are having an existential meltdown and as the end credits roll, your orientation to reality has altered. Was that real? Was he real? Is any of this real or are we stuck in a parallel universe of Atlee’s imagination where everything on screen unravels as a duller version of his stylistic choices?

Mentioning Atlee is important because Baby John is a scene-by-scene remake of his 2016 Tamil film, Theri. But it is all the more necessary because if anything Kalees’ film does with conviction it is to reiterate the immense watchability of Jawan (2023), Atlee’s directorial debut in Hindi. In hindsight, it might be difficult to extricate the merit of the outing from the aura of Shah Rukh Khan but Baby John proves that the unhinged style, frantic editing, loud expositions, and whistle-worthy hero entries, all too synonymous with Atlee, have a science and commerce to it. And when not done well, the exaggerated machismo and the breakneck speed do not distract from a deficient screenplay but reveal it to be a mangled set piece, no good for anybody.

Baby John is that. It is cocksure of an outing that gallivants with a severely underwritten script for a bloated 165 minutes and possesses the confidence of a 16-year-old man. It takes less than a minute for it to fail spectacularly and in the process, it earns the distinction of being the worst Hindi film this year, and god knows there have been a handful of contenders.

Before we go any further, I have a host of questions. What kind of a father-daughter duo refers to each other as ‘baby?’ What kind of a love story has the leads fall in love in 2 seconds? What kind of film slots a booming background score for every mood designed under the assumption that the audience might be blind and in case they don’t see something on screen, they will at least hear it? Why is every character a supposed undercover agent but when the time arrives none of them performs to save their lives? And what kind of sweet talk is a husband telling his almost-dead wife that she is like a mother to him? No wonder she drops dead right then, realising quickly that nothing is worth returning to this man.

Written by Atlee (Sumit Arora of Jawan fame is credited with the dialogues), Baby John has at least five films rolled into one and yet not one sticks. There is a father-daughter tale, a Badlapur-style revenge drama, a thriller centring on the abduction and rape of underage girls, some churlish story about fathers being the best, and another about the corruption in the police force. They come together like oil and water, each fighting with the other for some leg space only to collapse on an overeager face of Varun Dhawan who really just wants to fight.

Dhawan plays Satya Verma, an amiable Deputy Commissioner of Police who appears to be working more as an entrepreneur. We hardly see him at the station. He is either going to meet prospective brides with his mother (Sheeba Chaddha) or hitting local goons with a stick. All he wants is good vibes. Some triviality later he falls in love with Meera (Keerthy Suresh making her Hindi debut), a doctor who of all things, has a problem with his profession. One day (the only day he went to work), he hears about the news of a missing girl. A one-day investigation with a dog leading as the sleuth reveals the involvement of Babbar Sher (Jackie Shroff; don’t ask) and his son, Ashwin (Armaan Khera). Satya kills Ashwin and wins the wrath of Babbar Sher (have mercy) for life. Shroff attacks his family and child and really late into the runtime Baby John becomes about two warring fathers.

Second time this year, the protagonist in a Hindi action film is called Satya. A couple of months earlier, it was Alia Bhatt in Jigra. Filmmaker Vasan Bala propped her diminutive frame up by subverting the excesses associated with an action star and revamped her instead as a desperate sister willing to do whatever it takes to protect her brother. In December, Satya has a new face and none of the insight. Dhawan has forever portrayed a certain kind of man who just stops short of becoming the excessive male hero action films routinely put at the forefront. Of all the actors, he could have done with the subversion and even though the film hints at his “baby face” Kalees displays none of the chops. His Satya is sweet and nice, obedient and dutiful but also menacing. There is a recurring line where Dhawan says there are many like him but this is his first time.

It is easy to see he is referring to his action era. With Baby John, Dhawan joins the long line of male actors transitioning to action stars who willingly hack and chop. He does the same but with an abject insincerity that gleams from the screen. It is perplexing. When he is not fighting, Dhawan goes about with a vanilla overcompensation like he is itching to fight and when he does, the actor feels strangely shaky. This strikes all the more because Baby John comes after Citadel Honey Bunny, his streaming debut and a potent showcase of his action prowess. Kalees does not even come close to replicating that, but then again everything in the film falls short.