Beginning with a clarification - as it was being speculated, BALA has nothing to do with either UJDA CHAMAN or its original Kannada film ONDU MOTTEYA KATHE meaning ‘Story of An Egghead’. Directed by Amar Kaushik, BALA has been made on the same familiar and repetitive pattern of Ayushmann films, wherein the key novel USP remains his unique personal problem involving every family member, which keeps resulting in many humourous situations throughout entertaining the majority of viewers.
This time, revolving around Ayushmann’s hidden problem of baldness, BALA intentionally plays to the gallery as a bit loud, tacky, subtle and meaningful film all together, making an impact in a few scenes and annoying in many others as a mixed bag. The first half specifically keeps its focus on entertainment introducing all relatable, interesting characters. And the clear winner among them all surprisingly turns out to be Yami Gautam representing the current generation of selfie-obsessed, social network celebrities, who have minimal or actually no existence out of the virtual world.
In fact, though Ayushmann delivers yet again playing a troubled youngster, Yami is the real attraction of the film and she is simply outstanding in her individual sequences delightfully playing it over-the-top as per her given role. Interestingly the best scene of the film also has Yami excelling on screen honestly explaining her reasons for remaining more concerned about her looks, image and presentation online.
On the other hand, the weakest feature of the film happens to be the character of Bhumi Pednekar having a weird kind of make-up of a dark-skin tone girl, with her skin-tone varying at various points of time questioning the continuity. Acting well, Bhumi gets her due attention in the second half, particularly towards the last act, when the film suddenly turns into a message oriented social drama mentioning many known but still disturbing, eye-opener facts of our looks-oriented society.
However, it is this finale only, due to which BALA becomes a mixed bag trying to achieve everything in its two hours of duration in a forced manner. It begins as a plain mainstream comedy made to please the audience, becomes a realistic entertaining attempt representing the present state of affairs in the mid and then tries to be a socially relevant meaningful film with a message in its last 30 minutes that struggle to impress.
But since the first two acts of the film are fairly entertaining presenting a novel theme, never exploited in a mainstream Hindi film before, BALA largely works due to its lead stars, co-actors and an authentic local ambience created making a fine effort. Also it has a few likable songs as Zindagi, Tequilla and a couple of old hit Punjabi songs - remade in a lesser impactful versions too, which will surely be liked by the ones who are not familiar with their originals.
Overall, BALA certainly could have been a lot better, had it not been forcibly written to please the viewers as another typical Ayushmann comedy sequel following the set format. In the present version, it comes up with a winning subject and characters, but lacks the depth required by the same made in a hurried manner.
So you can watch it once just for its entertainment quotient but the Kannada film on the similar subject remains the best of the lost without any doubt that deserves to be seen as a must along with the English subtitles.
Rating : 3 / 5
