‘Baby John’ movie review: Varun Dhawan rings in Christmas with a cacophonic entertainer

Varun Dhawan’s Baby John, a faithful adaptation of Vijay’s Theri, has its mass moments but the action drama suffers from an excess of manufactured sound and fury, signifying box office pressure

In the season of cross-pollination between the north and the south in cinemas, this week the cutesy Varun Dhawan dives into the backwaters of Kerala to emerge as an action hero. A fairly common name in God’s Own Country, the title plays on the actor’s image and the character’s arc. A typical story of a mouse who was once a tiger and is biding his time to roar again, Baby John is almost a scene-by-scene copy of Atlee’s Theri that was powered by the stardom of Vijay.

Presented by Atlee and directed by Kalees, Theri is a script that can help milk the craze for an established star. It doesn’t work as much for an actor looking for reinvention. For a long time, Varun has been working to find a middle ground between a Govinda and a Salman Khan. With Baby John, Varun underlines that he has shed his Bollywood babyhood to become his own man.

However, when you para-drop a Punjabi munda in the rumbustious South masala, you get the flavour of paneer in masala dosa and rice flour in chapati. Atlee circumvented these matters of taste in Jawan, a fresh story with his trademark mass flourishes, but Baby John fails to shed its roots. It is not the 1980s when Jeetendra could get away with the cut-and-paste job because not many had watched the original.

Also, the problem with recreating a film released in 2016 is that by 2024, the twists, which were predictable even back then, have lost their zing. All along, you remain ahead of the surprises that the screenplay throws at you, with utmost seriousness. The flashbacks and non-linear editing are nothing more than a gimmick.

Moreover, the social mores the film propagates have become even more questionable. For instance, peddling a male saviour trope is no longer cool. The job profile of three female characters, played by competent actors, is only to add a halo around the hero. Rajpal Yadav, as the sidekick obviously named Ram Sevak, has more meat than Keerthy Suresh and Wamiqa Gabbi put together.

What hasn’t changed, though, is celebrating a vigilante in uniform with extra-judicial powers to impart justice to the underprivileged. It is where Baby John scores. It starts as a tale of a kind-hearted police officer Satya Varma (Varun) who believes in reform rather than encountering criminals. After a long build-up, laced with a few genuine sparks between Varun and natural child actor Zara Zyanna, the film finds its purpose around intermission when Satya faces the moment of truth. Pushed by a monster Babbar Sher (Jackie Shroff), Satya becomes a disruptive force.

The subversion, however, remains short-lived as Kalees turns action into a proper noun and violence into a transitive verb. Like Babbar Sher, he hammers his point, leading to long, unwarranted scenes of bloodbaths that seem to have been designed to provide sadistic pleasure to the paying masses.