Dream Girl 2: Ayushmann Khurrana reloads box office mojo mixing comment with crass appeal

A young man has to cross-dress and pass off as a woman to get over crisis in life, and soon there are the lecherous men falling all over him. The one-line idea nutshells a sure shot winning formula on the commercial Bollywood screen that is old as the hills. Biswajeet in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Biwi Aur Makaan, Kamal Haasan in Chachi 420 and Govinda in Aunty No. 1 would merely be a few mentions among numerous actors that have used the template down the decades to woo the larger box office. Ayushmann Khurrana has joined the club with Dream Girl 2.

It’s a club that has seen many top stars drop by, too, for the odd naughty turn. Think Amitabh Bachchan gyrating to Mere angane mein in Laawaris or Mithun Chakraborty ‘shaking booty’ to Usha Uthup’s 36-24-36 in Roti Ki Keemat at the peak of their stardom. Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Akshay Kumar have also given the drag gag a shot, in Duplicate, Baazi and Khiladi respectively. Without exception, the intent is always to draw ribald laughs for an easy connect with the lowest common denominator.

When Ayushmann Khurrana tried a version of the idea for the first time in his 2019 release Dream Girl, the screenplay at least let him maintain a pall of sophistication. The Raaj Shaandilyaa directorial was about a small town guy, who plays Sita at the mohalla Ramleela, trying to earn money using his impeccable knack at impersonating the voice of a woman, after landing a job at a call centre that caters adult entertainment over the phone. The comedy of errors that ensues for the protagonist was sexist, though hilarious enough to rake in around Rs 200 crore, the entertainment quotient typically packaged with a social comment or two as all Khurrana flicks are.

If Khurrana and Shaandilyaa are back with a crasser tweak to the idea in Dream Girl 2, the purpose would seem obvious. The new film is Ayushmann Khurrana’s all-out surge at pampering the masses at a time when his box office report card hasn’t really been one worth flaunting. After delivering over half a dozen consecutive hits in three years between 2017 and 2019, the actor’s career has hit a few roadblocks lately. Post Dream Girl in 2019, his releases such as Bala, Gulabo Sitabo, Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, Anek, Doctor G and An Action Hero saw comparatively cold response from the public. The law of averages seemed to be catching up in an uncomfortably inverse manner, and it was time for Khurrana to try and get back the box office mojo.

Dream Girl 2 maintains the template of its predecessor mixing crass sexism with message and, by the look of initial box office response, the idea is working. Ayushmann Khurrana’s new film has delivered the actor’s career-best opening day, recording Rs 10.69 crore on its day of release.

For Khurrana, the element of irony lies in the fact that he has banked on the weakest script of his career yet to bail him out of bad times. The actor himself seems to bear a similarity with his Dream Girl 2 protagonist Karam here — desperate times call for desperate measures. For an actor of Ayushmann Khurrana’s calibre, it is unbelievable that he wasn’t aware that Dream Girl 2 was aimed at setting up a hamming fest, demanding its lead star and a fine assemblage of character artistes to play the buffoon. The cast includes proven aces as Paresh Rawal, Annu Kapoor, Manoj Joshi, Abhishek Bannerjee, Seema Pahwa and Vijay Raaz, after all, with the perennially underrated Ranjan Raj admirably essaying a guy who falls in love with Khurrana’s heroine avatar over the phone, in the script’s quick bid to rehash what worked in the 2019 film.

For a moment, and realising Khurrana’s urge to score a big hit, let’s keep aside all talk of the film’s regressive tone. In any case, when it comes to chasing the pot of gold, political correctness has never really been Bollywood’s priority. The fact that actually stumps you is the utter lack of originality about the comedy quotient in Dream Girl 2, as the script piles up one-liners and done-to-death set pieces in a bid to whip up random laughs. It’s as if the idea was to let Ayushmann Khurrana in drag move from joke to joke over a runtime of more than two hours.

Slapsticks are often known to have thin plots, so director Shaandilyaa and his co-writer Naresh Kathooria don’t waste time on novelties. Khurrana plays Karam, a jagraata performer in Mathura with no real job. His situation draws up the familiar scenario of a ‘gareeb’ Bollywood protagonist — the guy and his debt-ridden father (Annu Kapoor) live in a crumbling old house and he is in love with a girl of superior societal status (Ananya Panday). The girl, Pari, is gearing up for career as a lawyer. Her father (Manoj Joshi) tells Karam he must get a real job and repair the house first if he wants to wed Pari. A few convenient twists later, Karam ends up dressed as a woman, passing himself off as Pooja in order to woo a young man named Shah Rukh (Abhishek Banerjee).

The comedy of errors that Dream Girl 2 tries setting up with that premise is broadly on the lines of the Dream Girl formula. Only, despite the film’s loud treatment, the effort appears repetitive after a while. It is left to Ayushmann Khurrana to salvage his show with an effortless performance, as the storytelling falls back on cliches involving men who leech at Pooja and resort to over-the-top antics to portray their lust.

And then there is the ‘message’, without which an Ayushmann Khurrana film is never complete. “Tujhe pataa nahin kitna mushkil hota hai ladki banna. Ussey bhi mushkil hota hai ladki hona (You have no idea how tough it is to act as a girl. It is tougher being a girl),” goes Karam’s line that’s meant to define the film’s ‘social relevance’. It seems all too plastic amidst the bawdy carnival of laughs, an irony coming from an actor who has crafted his image as a screen idol with social consciousness. Tracking the box office numbers, though, what works for Karam/Pooja on screen is working for the film’s star off it, too. Ayushmann Khurrana for one isn’t complaining.

(Dream Girl 2 is in theatres right now)

Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist and journalist who loves to write on popular culture.