It was about the only time I heard a ripple of laughter in the preview theatre. It is the kind of punchline that masala movies use to bring the house down. And it says a great deal about Baby John, which weighs in at a punishing 164 minutes, that a comic’s dialogue gets more taalis than the hero’s ‘taqia kalaam’ line: ‘par main toh pehli baar aaya hoon’.
Actually, making masala movies is serious business too, especially when you see the baap of all masala, Pushpa 2 still reeling in the punters. That one is even longer, but there the hero feels organic, and the set-pieces have a rhythm to them, and the Sukumar-Allu Arjun duo throw everything — the kitchen sink, the dishwasher liquid, and the spuds — at us, and some of that stuff sticks.
The trouble with Baby John, a remake of Vijay’s 2016 hit Theri, with which Varun Dhawan, gets his big fat South masala film, is that very little sticks. The difference between good and bad masala is the novelty factor. Baby John feels like it is cobbled together from several sources: what’s with this endless fascination with ships and docks and containers, and heroes hanging upside down? First Pushpa, now Baby John.