‘Bunty Aur Babli 2’ movie review: An overblown reboot

Scenes are mounted like skits where the young and senior con artists are introduced in a new set of guises after every few minutes

Occasionally funny, largely pretentious, this over-the-top reboot of the lovable con franchise spends more time fussing over its brand value than telling a story. Vimmy Trivedi (Rani Mukerji) and Rakesh Trivedi (Saif Ali Khan in place of Abhishek Bachchan) are forced out of their domestic bliss to take on a new set of con artists (Siddharth Chaturvedi and Sharvari Wagh) who have conducted a series of heists using the title of Bunty Aur Babli.

From giving Ganga river on lease under a public-private partnership scheme to a political leader collecting huge donations on her birthday or for that matter rampant unemployment despite churning out engineers by the minute from private education factories, writer-director Varun Sharma hints at real-life instances in the guise of humour but somehow the screenplay feels more like a Powerpoint presentation to persuade a producer to invest in his brand.

Scenes are mounted like skits where the young and senior con artists are introduced in a new set of guises after every few minutes. The con jobs work when the makers are able to sell them to the paying audience, not to the gullible characters on screen. When the accent has not been chewed enough, it irks. Pankaj Tripathi, as the wily police officer who ropes in Vimmy and Rakesh, shows how to do it but the lead players are found wanting. After a point, even the unassuming Tripathi looks at a loss as to how to sail over a script where everything is underlined with a bleeding marker.