As a light-hearted, family comedy SARDAR KA GRANDSON didn’t have any negative vibes before the release and just seemed to be another average project exploiting the India-Pakistan emotions with an innovative angle. But sadly, that wasn’t the case post its online release.
In reality, as the film began, it turned out to be a completely fake attempt in terms of presentation, language, and understanding of the culture depicted in its unusual storyline. To be fair, nobody expects perfection in the diction or dialect in such casually made projects based on a bizarre thought. But then, one at least expects the writer and director to know something about the region, people, and their language being depicted on screen.
Giving you the gist, the film is focused on an ailing grandmother (Neena Gupta) of a Punjabi/Sikh family in Punjab , wherein everyone addresses the old lady as ‘Sardar’. Now which Punjabi or Sikh family calls the grandmother ‘Sardar’ is the question to be asked from the film’s writer and director. The story is about the grandmother’s last wish fulfilled by her grandson (Arjun Kapoor) and hence the title SARDAR KA GRANDSON – what a creative expression indeed!
This one prominent (fake) insertion that keeps on repeating throughout the film from the first scene to the last, is the most annoying one, apart from the other absurdities taking the viewers for granted. Plus, the scenes of carrying a heritage kind of building on a normal truck (like a cardboard model), transporting it from Lahore to Amritsar is something like a never-before comedy of course, without any second thoughts.
Surprisingly, the film has been written by a team of three persons with probably no authentic exposure to Punjab. At the same time, it features three actors coming from Punjabi background (families) as Arjun Kapoor, Rakul Preet Singh, and above all the veteran Kanwaljeet Singh. It’s unbelievable that they all kept addressing the grandmother as ‘Sardar’ in the entire filming and never informed the makers that the very axis of the script was entirely wrong both in terms of language and expressions.
Maybe that is how Hindi film projects are being made in the present, wherein you take your money, do your assigned work, and move on to the next, without interfering in anything given to you as a character, even when you very well know that it’s simply illogical, insane and not even close to anything real.
However, the bigger irony is that in the present world of OTT we are watching great works like KARNAN (Tamil) and OPERATION JAVA (Malayalam) along with poor stuff like RADHE and SARDAR KA GRANDSON as a part of our Indian Cinema made with such contrasting visions. No doubt, Hindi cinema is fast losing its ground against the outstanding work being done in our Indian regional language movies.
In short, this can only be seen (for its lighter feel), in case you fail to find anything else in the hundreds of options available on Netflix in various languages.
Rating : 1 / 5 (including an additional 0.5 for the otherwise sincere act of Neena Gupta)
