Bhool Chuk Maaf movie review: Rajkummar Rao, Wamiqa Gabbi film feels like poor man’s Brahmastra

It’s not just to a place either. The film has so many ideas, people, strands, plots jostling about that it is obvious director Karan Sharma struggled to fill even its 121-minute length. The songs, one worse than the other, don’t help. Nor the fact that lovers Ranjan Tiwari (Rao) and Titli Mishra (Gabbi) seem to operate on different planes.

The central strand is that the unemployed Ranjan and the spoiled Titli are desperate to get married. Titli’s dad (Zakir Hussain) lays down one condition: that Ranjan get a government job within two months. After suggesting that it might go into the interminable wait for a job in a country where recruitment exams are at the mercy of sarkaar or scamsters, Bhool Chuk Maaf slithers into jugaad territory.

Watch Bhool Chuk Maaf movie trailer:

It as easily sidles in, and skips out of, problematic issues such as dowry, for laughs, as you wonder more and more what Titli, with at least money and looks going for her, sees in Ranjan – who, she herself points out more than once, has little, if anything, going for him.

That could be a story too, as the free-spirited Titli threatens to upset Ranjan’s world, with his mother an enterprising breadwinner with a business in pickles. But just when you are digging into your popcorn, the film takes its most ambitious turn, and stumbling, swerving and somersaulting – even as you wish it would just keep lying down for once – finds a moral centre! There is even a mild stab at communal harmony, while Karan Sharma (also the co-writer) is at it.

Yet, this need not have been such a stew of Ghat meets Groundhog Day. There are very many good actors in Bhool Chuk Maaf, starting with Rao, and including several usual suspects that Bollywood casts when it comes to Uttar Pradesh. They serve their own roles well. Gabbi is pretty and proficient, but, sadly, the most half-baked of them. There are also very many scenes which work on their own, and even evoke some laughs.

Ultimately, Bhool Chuk Maaf may end up being remembered for all that happened off screen – the confusion between its theatrical and OTT release, and a “compromise” (which has worried many in the industry) that means that within two weeks, it will be showing on a TV near you.

Bhool Chuk Maaf movie cast: Rajkummar Rao, Wamiqa Gabbi, Sanjay Mishra, Zakir Hussain, Anubha Fatehpuria, Raghubir Yadav, Seema Pahwa, Ishtiyak Khan
Bhool Chuk Maaf movie director: Karan Sharma
Bhool Chuk Maaf movie rating: 2 stars