Raksha Bandhan review: Not a perfect ode to brotherly love

Hyderabad: Anand L. Rai plays the perfect spoil sport. On the day when the nation is celebrating the sibling relationship, he chooses to tell us a tale dealing with a tale that labours on how much a brother has to suffer to get four sisters married.

The project that has out lived its shelf life comes at a time when Bollywood is praying for a healthy hit, which looks like a mirage every Friday. Released in the midst of the ‘boycott controversy’, the players may well be inclined to blame it on the happenings outside the film and overlook their own doings. A film that is often retrograde and indulges in large scale body shaming, you would hardly have expected Mr.Clean to associate with a story that tends to be serious and if anything projects women as dependent on men and parasites that are making merry.

Lala Kedarnath (Akshay Kumar) runs Swarna Latha Eatery at Chandini Chowk. He is more than a proud brother who is attached to his four sisters and is expending his dreams and times for them. On the other hand, he is making sexist comments and does not blink an eyelid to body shame them. None the less he is committed to get his sisters Gayatri (Sadia Katheb) Laxmi (Smrithi Srikant) Saraswati (Sahejmeen Kaur) and Durga ( Deepika Khanna) married. Waiting at the isle is his lady love Sapna (Bhumi Padnekar) who knows that their love story is on the back burner till all the girls in family are married. This is notwithstanding her dad Harishanker Sharma (Neeraj Sood) constantly badmouthing his prospective son-in-law and telling him that he is no longer going to wait for the foursome to walk up the altar.

So on Raksha Bandhan, we have a coiled up tale on dowry prohibition, siblings waiting for Prince Charming and being taunted about their weight or the tone of their skin or their lack of feminine grace. Furthermore, Anand Rai has not made up his mind when reports last came in as to whether he want to make a serious film on the impediments of a middle class youngster burdened with the challenge of getting his sisters into safe matrimony or a tongue in cheek Akshay Kumar comedy. Resultantly he divides the script in two halves. The first is the comedy space for Akshay and the later the melodrama of Raksha Bandhan. Strangely it is in the latter part that both the filmmaker and the actor are found in form.

Yet again, the film is Akshay dependent. The actor does his usual dead pan comedy in the initial part of the film and comes into his own as a good actor and the one who has often been wasted in mainstream cinema. In the latter part of the film, he toils to undo a loose script to a strong credible tale even after it has outlived its time. The sob story dealing with dowry death is so out of place and out of sync that you feel you are suddenly sent in a time machine to the 1960s. This is notwithstanding the fact that the film informs that there are 20 dowry deaths every day in the country. Bhumi Pednekar makes a pathetic attempt to be part of the commercial space. This outing is good only because it is but for less than two hours and such film makers must be respected. The only other reason would be Akshay Kumar. Be sure this is the last film you want to see with your sibling on the day of Raksha Bandhan.