‘Lage Raho Munna Bhai’
Lage Raho Munna Bhai, the sequel to Munna Bhai MBBS, is awesome! It’s an adorable, tear-jerking comedy about a kind-hearted gangster visited by the ghost of Gandhi. When Bollywood hits, it hits. Good family film too. Don’t miss it.
Vidya Balan is the new Manish Koirala, all eyes and vulnerability, although the script feeds her more syrup than range. She does a less manic impression of Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam. Boman Irani is a comedic god as Lakhbir ‘Lucky’ Singh, a shrewd and venal Sikh builder with a taste for loud shirts. Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi are competent. Diya Mirza is suitable in glycerine. My erstwhile salsa instructor in Bombay, or his identical twin, has a good-sized role as a heartless son — quite a surprise. One of the characters is named Gaitonde, the same as the don in Sacred Games. There’s a reference to either Titanic or Dil Se.
The script is relatively tight for Bollywood. Things that happen earlier feed into events later, and so on. The drunken song with a fade-in, fade-out circus is fabulous and technically slick; the lion masks look like an homage to Don. It is a family flick, so it doesn’t have the impact of an Omkara or Devdas. It’s more like a lighter Rang De Basanti or an Indian Pay It Forward, an idealistic, Gandhian script which uses situation comedy to get across some serious tactics. Of course shame is a powerful lever in India and the UK. But in the Paris Hilton U.S.?
Turn out the lights, folks, Boman Irani’s shirt is in the house:
My salsa instructor gets his kundi beaten:
Watch the trailer:
Here’s a funny Irani shot from another comedy:
By the way, the Eklavya trailer looked excellent…
on Saturday, September 2nd, 2006, 4:49 am in Film › 
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Good NOtes
thanks Manish for the review.
I just booked tickets for the movie this afternoon for me and two american girl friends of mine without reading any reviews on the movie wondering if I was taking a risk by showing my american friends munnabhai, their first hindi film…
glad the movie is great..thank u..
I watched the film in London amid high expectations.
Technically the film is super and the music was good and fitting.
VidyaBalan is ravishing - she’s got this built-in radiance and charm. She deserved more polished co-actors in support.
But the plot was thin, vapid and predictable.
As with most Bolly films, the execution lacks subtlety and sophistication, that is, it’s all too obvious leaving the imagination unchallenged.
Sanjay Dutt is too old and wooden for Vidya and Arshad is plain boorish and clownish. He badly needs lessons in diction and delivery.
Time for Sanjay to retire.
Eddie
Finally you like a bollywood movie, good to know that :)
Do you have Vidya Balan’s email address?
But it’s not a sequel - it is said to be one of the many movies in the “Munna Bhai Series” of movies…
…and then again, I haven’t yet watched it for myself - so I wouldn’t know!
I loved it too ! Great feel good movie. Jokes are hilarious… glad I’m understading much more of the hindi than when I saw Munna Bhai MBBS :)
I finally watched the movie!
It was great except, but some thing did disappoint me - there were no “jadu ki jhappis.” :(