Babul- Extremely Sentimental

Cast: Amitabh Bachchan Hema Malini, Salman Khan, Rani Mukherjee , John Abraham, Om Puri, Aman Verma, Parmeet Sethi, Rajpal Yadav, Smita Jaykar, Avtar Gill, Gargi Patel

Director: Ravi chopra Producer: B.R.Chopra
Primary Audience: Older Audience
Genre: Family Drama
Movie Overall Rating: ** (2 star out of 5)

Sentimentality needs to be balanced either by good story content with depth or by hilarious comedy. Neither happens here. Hence the sentimentality goes overboard. Babul looks like an ineffective joint sequel of Baghban and Viruddh, both well handled sentimental movies. Babul in spite of having a noble subject like widow remarriage, top of the line stars and great acting as always from Amitabh, it lacks the ability to touch hearts because of a superficiality and cliché kind of dialogs, settings and cast; very predictable story and not to mention the image branding of many products.


The movie revolves around Amitabh Bachan, ( Balraj Kapoor)- the Babul.The story in brief is about the buddy son Salman Khan( Avinash/Avi) and daughter-in-law Rani Mukerjee( malavika/Mili) who have a typical romance, marriage and child. When Avi exits, Amitabh wants to reintroduce her to her old friend John Abraham( Rajat) to get color and happiness back in her life!


The first half of the movie was much longer to create a highly sophisticated, progressive and sporty image of the characters of the movie, having modern outlook and traditions. All this to help in the image branding for Audi! Hence there were prolonged car racing with the Audi in focus; golf games, American education, Hi flying parties and kabhi khusi kabhi gham like settings.


Well that was not enough, we had chai time with Taj Mahal Tea in coffee shops, painting kid’s room with Nerolac paints, and even a life insurance was advertised. Not only did the movie gain money for advertising for many products like Audi, Taj Mahal Tea, Nerolac Paints and Kotak Life Insurance; it even got a tax break for the subject of widow remarriage. Hence I guess producers were not worried for audience response and viewers money!


In spite of Amitabh Bachchan’s good acting and even singing his songs, it wasn’t enough to make the movie worth watching. Hema Malini miraculously still looks her beautiful self, but alas still carries the south Indian Hindi accent after so many movies! Salman Khan is aging but caries himself well. Rani Mukherjee does well in the complex role. The handsome John Abraham shows least enthusiasm to be part of this movie, except when he is in a song! Sarika is also in this movie, but don’t know why she came back in an insignificant role.


Music of ‘Babul’ was average. ‘Kehta Hai Babul’ and the theme song sung by Amitabh Bachchan were touching. The songs of the movie were not something you remember and hum later. Some of them are slow too. The bhangra number ‘come on, come on’ looked like the K3G ‘Shava Shava’, with pink dress dancing blondes replaced by blue! A number (Bawri Piya’) showing intimacy is getting common these days in many movies.


Babul would have been a better movie if it had not just taken the existing productized formula and just added the subject of widow remarriage to it. I hope the producers learn to realize that audiences have a limitation to digest formula masalas movies, and make movies with intelligent and exclusive style.