Wild Wild Punjab: An Exhausting Break-up Drama That's Unfunny And Unfeeling

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AT THIS POINT IN TIME, it is easier to spot a Luv Ranjan film than predict Mumbai’s monsoons. There are some well-rehearsed pointers: men prone to cuss words, women possessing the emotional intelligence of a toaster and intellectual bandwidth of a street lamp. Women are mean and cunning; men are gullible and nice. Women break hearts and men learn to live with it; all that women want is to take advantage of men, and all that the good-natured men desire is to be taken advantage of. It is an almost-cute set-up in the filmmaker’s deeply misogynistic world that is begging for an intervention. All it begets, however, is disorganised chaos.

Even by such dismal standards, Ranjan’s new work, Wild Wild Punjab (he is credited with the story, while the screenplay credits are shared by Sandeep Jain and Harman Wadala — writers on the terrific 2021 series, Tabbar) is an exhausting break-up drama that is unfunny and unfeeling in equal measure; not one joke lands, not a single line of dialogue bears any originality. This might seem like a sweeping statement about most of Ranjan’s previous outings but Wild Wild Punjab is truly in a league of its own, in which boredom is built into every frame and indifference is written over every actor’s face. Directed by Simarpreet Singh, this Netflix comedy gives mediocrity a facelift.

In case you think this is harsh, let me be clearer. Wild Wild Punjab is a film in which men are busy doing exactly two things: talking about killing themselves or drinking alcohol. No one works and no one cares. It is also that film where the female characters are neatly segregated into three kinds: the scheming, the brainless, and the heartless. Wild Wild Punjab is derivative in form and theme, freely borrowing jokes discarded from other Ranjan films and the Fukrey franchise and if the makers had any insight, they would have named it The Leftovers.

Rajesh Khanna (Varun Sharma, still in his Fukrey headspace), Maan Arora (Sunny Singh, still bad), Honey Singh (Manjot Singh, also in his Fukrey headspace) and Gaurav Jain (Jassie Gill) are friends. They refer to each other by their surnames and are tied up with Big Life Problems. Maan wants to get laid, Honey owns a car (named Paro) that’s dearer to him than anything else in the world, Gaurav is too frightened of his father (Gopal Dutt), and Rajesh is unable to face rejection. He and his ex-girlfriend Vaishali used to work at the same office but she dumped him after having a fling with their boss. 

It has been a while but Rajesh, like a typical Ranjan hero who is not engineered to comprehend a ‘no’ from a girl, cannot move on. Every other day he threatens to kill himself (suicide, like dowry, is a joke in the film) but one day his friends say, enough. Vaishali (‘the heartbreaker’ and unfailingly referred to as Vaishya — the Hindi word for prostitute) is about to get married at Pathankot and they hatch a plan where Rajesh will turn up to say he is over her. The film centres on the road trip that these friends take so that a man can tell a woman that he is done with her. On her wedding day.

Along the way misadventures happen; nothing noteworthy but worrying all the same. They gatecrash a wedding where Gaurav ends up getting married to the bride, Radha (the brainless one), because her supposed groom wanted more dowry and an inebriated Gaurav had taken a stand. It matters not that he is a stranger, it matters not that no one asked even once if Radha wanted to get married to a man she has not seen in her life before. This is a Luv Ranjan world and women exist to be made jokes of. And when there are not, they are depicted as vamps. Enter Meera (Ishita Raj), the drug-peddler college student who for some strange reason wears blue contact lenses and vapes like she enjoys smoke on her face.

If Wild Wild Punjab has no idea about women, it has lesser clue about how to design gags. Each is crafted with as much thought as I give to avocados, which is to say not much. The tone in the film is a thing of wonder as at least four things always happen in one scene and each is tonally dissimilar from the previous one. Sample this: a girl goes to a drug lord to get money, she decides to blackmail them for more money, another woman gets horny, and another man loses his mind because his beloved car is dented. Such excess could have worked but Wild Wild Punjab has neither the ingenuity nor the commitment to sell even one of these with conviction.

There is too much to dislike in Wild Wild Punjab but the most is how jaded everything about it is — the actors reprising roles they can do in their sleep, the loud aesthetic that makes it seem the outing is an unending music video, and depicting Punjabis in simplistic polarities, as if they were born to be made fun of. The film is so derivative that its carbon footprint is zero. The only wild thing about Wild Wild Punjab is that it got made.

The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of OTTplay. The author is solely responsible for any claims arising out of the content of this column.