Cast: Kartik Aaryan, Nushrat Bharucha, Sunny Singh, Ishita Sharma, Alok Nath, Deepika Amin, Virendra Saxena

Rating: **1/2

Director: Luv Ranjan

Though Bollywood has started this new year on a success note but then there are few films which failed to impress the audience on Box-Office. In this tensed situation where everybody is feeling low due to much ongoing crisis director Luv Ranjan has come up with his tested formula and he has tasted the success again.

Luv Ranjan - of Pyaar Ka Punchnama fame - is back with his team of actors, Nushrat Bharucha, Kartik Aaryan and Sunny Singh, and a new film, Sonu Ki Titu Ki Sweety. It is the story of a girlfriend and a friend fighting over the 'possession' of a man.


The film opens with Kartik aka Sonu delivering a Pyaar Ka Punchnama-style speech; only he is talking about the illogical demands of a client. We are soon told, through a few more similar throwbacks to Ranjan's past films, that Sonu runs an event management company and his friend Titu (Sunny) is an idiot who hooks up with all the wrong girls and doesn't even realize they are fooling him. He only has Sonu to save him from the assaults the womankind has decided to wreck on him.

Enter Sweety (Nushrat) via the arranged marriage route and Sonu's life is shaken to the core. Not only is he insecure about 'losing' his friend, he even believes Sweety is too good to be true. While the character clearly is unreal, the only mean thing she does in the entire movie is to tell Sonu that she is 'chalu'. The filmmaker wants us to believe she is a gold-digger, with the 'gold-digger' song playing in the background, but the story offers nothing to substantiate the claims.

The film was being promoted with the tagline of 'bromance vs romance' and the privileged thinking of the makers ultimately assumed it to be a case of bhai vs ladki. No thought occurred in the minds of either the writer or the director that the material they were producing was dated to the core, and was meant only to entertain a certain 'privileged' section of the society, while the other half watches it with a clenched fist, laughing not at the jokes but at the sheer ignorance of the director.


Now, to be fair the plot seems interesting and it might have been an enjoyable experience, had they kept at least the fight 'genderless' by making it between a best friend and a lover. However, the makers decided to take the path most sexist and turned the entire plot and message into entertainment for the 'guys'. But hey, we've enjoyed Pyaar Ka Panchnama, so what's so wrong with this film? Well, while the film lacks a basic sense of the world, it also misses the connection and over-dramatized depiction of something as relatable as friendship makes the film lose the touch. And because the makers couldn't show the 'faulty' behavior in Sweety's character, they made her say it out loud 'twice' that she's the 'bad guy' here for basically helping Titu built a life away from Sonu's toxicity (How dare she! This entire gender needs to be banished from the planet and just 'bros' should exist but the two men shouldn't convey their weirdly low-key romance with each other because it's gay and we are making a film for 'dudes').

There are so many eye-roll moments in the film that even your eyes start hurting after a bit and you actually have to watch the film. The film repeats itself at every given moment and is stretched to a point where the day and night of every wedding ceremony is shown! There are certain scenes which will remind you of Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani, especially the treatment of the songs.


The boys-not-men do the same thing; as do the girls. Talking about the cast, Kartik Aaryan and Sunny Singh do have chemistry and you want to root for them but the glaring sexism keeps coming in the way. Nushrat Bharucha is pleasant and deserved more than just narrowing her eyes or a plotting smile. Bharucha is capable of more, but she's made to narrow her eyes to the exclusion of all other expressions.

So yes, Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety is breezy enough and provides some laughs, some of which escape involuntarily. But it also leaves you wondering. Can Ranjan grow up his callow characters? Of course, he can, because he has the smarts (remember Pyar Ka Punchnama?). Does he really want to? I'm not sure. Sharp comedy of the sexes is the hard stuff. Cheap laughs are easy.