Hero is a sharp shooter where he aims at the ‘perfect 10’ target as a sport. Though it’s a different matter that when he shoots the villains, he just goes through the motions randomly.
Hero is also a guitarist and a vocalist. If he is not singing ‘Sayonee’ at the outdoor stage of Kingdom of Dreams [Gurgaon], he goes indoors and serenades his leading lady there.
When he is not doing any of this, he goes on a hunt for his girlfriend who has gone missing somewhere in Russia.
Missing girlfriend. Panic call. Flesh trade. Foreign land. Corrupt cops. One man against all. Reminds of something?
Well, all of this has already been seen in Vidyut Jammwal starrer Khuda Hafiz that premiered on Disney+Hotstar a few months back. This time around, newcomer Tanmay Ssingh has a job in hand to save Musskan Sethi from the Russian mafia with the help of a cop [Rahul Roy, still struggling to act 30 years after making his debut with Aashiqui] who is settled in the bad land.
If directors Nitin Gupta & Abhay Singhal are to be believed, Russia is a beautiful location (very good cinematography here, a plus) made of dumb cops (they allow everyone around them to be bashed up by a cop in a pigeon hole of a police station, before administrating a stun-gun), dumber high security prison guards (you can just walk in with a gun, kill all, come back, have your sandwich, go to sleep) and the dumbest gang lord (in a sprawling mansion, he has one layer of security, which by the way should have been fired, had it been spared by the hero).
Wait, there is more. On finding out that his girlfriend is in trouble, the hero flares up his nostrils in extreme close ups, only to make a rather relaxed landing in Russia, casually chatting with the helpful cop [Rahul Roy] and then almost tempted to take a sip from a bottle of vodka, before abruptly realizing that he is in there for a mission. Oops, there comes a Russian stripper, Lena, who also knows Hindi ‘as it’s the need of the business’ while being a temptress. They end up spending a night together though it’s unknown whether they ‘did it’ or not.
So there you go. The four key characters have been established and now it’s time for the man to get his girlfriend out of the ‘crime capital’ of the world (the makers say this, not us). However, not before the flashback story is told with ‘Punjab da pind’ coming into action. This in fact is the best part of the film as you get into a Jab We Met zone, this time with the girl landing unannounced at the boy’s place. As parents, Yograj Singh and Upasna Singh are into ‘bass toh phir rishta pucca samjhe’ mode and a song or two only brings some spark in the proceedings.
However, darker times await the couple in Russia and while one may have expected the style-n-glitz quotient to make Sayonee even better, the shoddy execution and the sheer impossibility of many a sequence makes one look the other way. There is a customary double twist in the tale as well, a la Abbas Mustan school of cinema, and while the first one is something that you could see coming from the opening set of scenes itself, the second one is in fact good. That said, I am still scratching my head to understand the relevance of the ‘judwaa’ factor here.
Amongst actors, Tanmay does have a good screen presence and in a softer role he can do well. He is all over the place when required to scream and make noise but in the tender romantic moments, he is better. As for Muskaan, she looks good and also acts ably whenever she gets a scene for herself. However, just like it happened with Shivaleeka Oberoi in Khuda Hafiz, she also goes missing in the second half.
As for Rahul Roy, he tries to bring on nostalgia by humming along to the tune of ‘Jaane Jigar Jaaneman’ playing in the background. Well, no such nostalgia can touch your heart when there is no rhyme or reason to it.
That pretty much stands true for the whole film as well.
Rating: *1/2