‘Double XL’ movie review: Huma Qureshi, Sonakshi Sinha’s comedy-drama is more a sermon than a film

Director Satram Ramani’s dated storytelling in ‘Double XL’ focuses a lot on raising the issue of body-shaming, rather than telling an engaging story

More of an essay on body-shaming than a piece of cinema, Double XL is yet another example of good intentions leading to a drab film. The makers seem so focused on raising the issue and reflecting diversity on screen, that they seem to have forgotten that the noble idea needs to be packaged into a compelling story as well.

In its current shape, it reads like a newspaper feature on fat-shaming which invariably starts with a case study. Here we have two. Rajshri Trivedi (Huma Qureshi) is a healthy girl from Meerut who wants to become a sports presenter. However, her mother is keen on finding her a suitable match, and the channel she aspires to join hires people on the basis of their body statistics. Saira Khanna (Sonakshi Sinha) is an aspiring designer, whose body weight comes in the way of her relationships and confidence. They coincidently meet each, and fly to London where they shed the baggage of social pressures, and along the way, discover two interesting boys who understand them.

Director Satram Ramani’s storytelling is as dated as Saira’s designs. Almost the entire duration of the film is spent on giving us an insight into the protagonists’ lives through dialogues that seem to have been picked from an opinion piece on fat-shaming. They sound sharp and well-meaning, particularly the ones about men’s fascination for a particular body type, and how we tend to see the faults in only our stars. But they are not new for the discerning, and for the layman, they are not placed in the middle of a compelling storyline.

Both Huma and Sonakshi are not bad and have put their best feet forward to make the material soar. However, Huma fumbles in getting the Meerut accent right; it sounds more like the eastern Uttar Pradesh/ Bihar accent that she aced in Maharani.

Rajshri’s gradual attraction towards a budding cinematographer Shrikant (Mahat Raghavendra) over Tamil songs promises some lovely moments, as for a change, a commercial Hindi film looks for diversity in love. So does a cheeky Pathan line producer’s (Zaheer Iqbal) bonding with Saira. But again, they remain as boxes that the makers want to tick rather than resulting in something really engaging and entertaining. It’s good to see veteran actress Shobha Khote back on screen, but she has precious little to do. So does Kanwaljeet Singh. And, like a writer who doesn’t know where to put the full stop, Mudassar Aziz and Sasha Singh keep adding extra paras even after the point is underlined with a bleeding pen.

Double XL is currently running in theatres