Three films poorly crammed into one

Rating: 2/10 (25 September 2019)

This movie is a textbook example of a film spreading itself too thin. It cuts so much essential background information that I assume it would only make sense to Indian citizens. For someone like me with a very minimal understanding of Indian history and current politics, it would have been far better if it were split into three separate movies.
The first movie is a ragtag group of party animals who refuse to admit they're too old for the party life, and they eventually find and accept their roles their roles in society. Second is the political statement trying to raise awareness for a current issue. Third is the historical film about anti-British revolutionaries. The movie attempts to combine the three stories by having the group learn from history and take a stand against the current political injustice.
That last sentence makes combining them sound like a great idea, so I can understand why the producer thought it would work out well, but mashing three films down into an already tedious 2:45 runtime quickly turns into a screenwriter's nightmare. The "college" story has too many characters and not enough time for the viewer to relate to any of them. The political story has basically no background information, and it isn't even introduced until 2 hours into the film. As a Westerner, I think the government's reactions to several events are ridiculously unbelievable, and background explaining and establishing the government as corrupt should have been essential, but this movie simply doesn't have time for it. Finally, the historical film teaches the history, but it's so rushed and glossed over that it feels much closer to a history lecture rather than the inspiring story of bravery that was intended.
Aside from that huge mistake of overextending, this film has a lot of minor poor decisions that I've come to expect from Bollywood films. First is being behind the timed, this time reminiscient of a 1990's film (for a 2006 film), which is actually one of the most up to date Indian films I've seen so far. The acting has an awkwardly disingenuous feel that is familiar of 90's sitcoms. The music is evenly split between a very 90's sound and between songs that have lyrics so strong and loud that the song overpowers the scene. This movie also has the terrible Bollywood dance numbers, but I appreciated that they weren't full blown musicals.
On that note, I really don't understand India's obsession with the musical numbers. One of the characters in this movie actually says the music and dancing is the whole reason India makes movies, which is a horrible way of thinking about it. It's disturbingly immersion-breaking when a random music video is cut awkwardly into the middle of a movie and it has nothing at all to do with the plot. Again, this movie surprisingly doesn't have that problem (though there could have been a little less dancing), but the dialogue draws attention to it.