Dosanjh is credited as producer as well as star, and Yanky Singh has evidently been seized upon as a potential transitional role: he gets to act the dashing young blade in the opening nightclub number, lining up women like shots, before creeping back into Yanky's mansion in the early hours and spending the rest of the first half up to his elbows in Pampers and formula. (One good, goofy sight gag early on: Yanky tries wearing a mask of a woman's face to reassure the newborn while feeding, starting with the mother's own, before graduating to Scarlett Johansson and Gal Gadot.) Yet it's a showcase built on flimsy foundations, and the longer one sits with them, the flimsier they seem. I'm not sure director Amarjit Singh Saron and writer Rakesh Dhawan (who penned the Chal Mera Putts) have troubled to do much research into the specificities of Canadian custody arrangements, the adoption system, childcare provision, or even what people wear when boarding intercontinental flights. A lot, then, depends on Dosanjh's easy charm, and in fairness, the star does know how to milk a laugh from basic business: humming to himself while walking into a restaurant, or lobbing his phone number in Bajwa's general direction. (In a momentary subversion of Indian cinema norms, Jasmine initially has the persistent Yanky arrested for stalking - but he still goes back to interfere with the running of her yoga class.)
The problem is that charm has to stretch a long way here. Good Newwz recruited Dosanjh to play something like a mixed doubles match with capable colleagues; though he has some funny-sweet scenes with Grewal, Honsla Rakh mostly finds him going solo for 145 minutes, and stuck in the same mode for much of it - that of the big kid who barely seems more mature than the child he's raising. (Only the gods know how the judge ruled in his favour.) Like its protagonist, this male-authored film also manages to be clumsy, sometimes careless around its women. A couple of fatshaming non-jokes would be ungallant in any circumstances, but they play as especially misjudged in a film that regards women as babymakers. Kaur Gill is such an interestingly melancholy screen presence you wonder if the film will properly broach the sadness of that first, failed relationship at some point, but no: she's shunted offscreen to make room for Yanky's quest for renewed happiness, and only recalled amid the chaos of the wedding finale, at which she arrives dressed like she's popping to ASDA. At the time of writing, this broadly amiable yet immediately forgettable fluff boasts a 9.1 user rating on IMDb - higher not only than Good Newwz, but also The Godfather Part II, GoodFellas and The Seven Samurai, which suggests either its audience are cock-a-hoop to be back at the Cineworld, or that someone's had a go at the algorithm. Either way, in time, that will surely come down. Be patient.
Honsla Rakh is now playing in selected cinemas.
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