‘Hum Do Hamare Do’ Movie Review: Limp Romantic Comedy!

Cast: RajKummar Rao, Kriti Sanon, Paesh Rawal, Ratna Shah, Manu Rishi Chadha

Director: Abhishek Jain

Rating: *1/2

An orphan who works at a dhaba runs away from home and ends up making it big some 12 years later. Having been deprived of a normal childhood, he wants to settle down even as he leads a cushy life. Fortunately, he runs into a girl who too has lost her parents, and yearns for a family.

Now, that premise doesn’t really verge on the preposterous, and could give us an engaging romcom, but director Abhishek Jain has a hackneyed treatment and relies on attractive stars to overcome its lacklustre execution. In a way, I am glad that the two-hour-long film has some great starcast, including two veterans, both of whom try to add gravitas to a film that doesn’t quite know whether to follow the comic track or label itself in the emotional drama category. But good actors alone can’t lift a film from getting into mediocrity!

Dhruv (RajKummar Rao) is an orphan who has made it on his own in the city of Chandigarh. Anya (Kriti Sanon) is a freelance blogger who lost her parents in a road accident and has been raised by her uncle, Dr Sanjeev Mehra (Manu Rish) and aunt (Prachi Shah) who dote on her. But deep down she longs to cozy herself in the midst of a family with parents. The two meet and sparks fly as both don’t wait to express their love each other and tie the knot soon.  

There seems to be a problem though: while Anya is honest about her life, Dhruv fears that she would not accept him as parentless child. “She is the one for me,” he believes and cannot afford to crush Anya’s desire to be married into a “perfect family.” And so, on the advice of his best friend (Aparshakti Khurrana) he decides to adopt a set of parents to make it appear like a complete family.

He recalls his good old days at the dhaba in Simla where he was raised by kiosk owner Purshottam Mishra (Paresh Rawal) who besides giving him some invaluable lessons on life, gave him the much needed love. Realising his future to be bright, Dhruv had run away to begin life afresh in Chandigarh where he is now an IT professional and has just launched his app named Jadugar. To appease Anya, he starts his hunt for the one saviour and finds Mishra whiling away time at a senior living home. He also learns that Mishra remained a bachelor, since he and his ladylove Dipti Kashyap (Ratna Shah) faced bitter opposition from her parents and couldn’t fulfil their ambition of uniting.  Both Dipti and Mishra haven’t seen each other for ages, even though they live in the same city. And so, Dhruv traces her living all by herself and after an initial hesitation, Dipti agrees to play along and act as Dhruv’s mother.

What follows is as predictable as the tides.  'Hum Do Hamare Do' is flimsy with an enjoyable edge to it. In that sense, it has its heart in the right place and that goodwill could have gone a long way. It also has the immensely gifted Ratna Pathak Shah and the talented Paresh Rawal to add their own bit of old-timer expertise to add a sense of belief. Not that the lead pair doesn’t try. Both Rao and Sanon look charming- especially Sanon, who is maturing into a fine actor.  They are both are fine in their roles; it’s the script that just doesn't do a good enough job of making their relationship believable. Add to this a confused moral message and it's clear that this romantic comedy never gets off the ground.

It's occasionally witty, but not very often. It seems the filmmakers realized that as well as they fill the frequent dry spells with twists that don’t really fit the tone of the movie.

For those of you who would want to study how a listless script can be filled with some watchable fare by dependable senior actors, this one could be a fun watch.

Just don't expect to remember much about it in the morning!