Happy Sardar Review: Kalidas Jayaram, Merin Philip

Happy Sardar Review: Kalidas Jayaram, Merin Philip

There are movies that had a life at the time of release and now look very cringe-worthy due to the outdated melodramatic style. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, Aniyathipravu, Niram, etc. are such movies that if you watch it now you won’t be able to sit through the melodrama and cheesiness. But the directors of the movie Happy Sardar, Sudip and Geethika seems to be still in love with those movies and they have created this fusion of outdated script ideas and called it Happy Sardar.

Happy Singh is born to a Malayali Christian mother and a Sikh father. He falls in love with a girl named Mary and eventually she falls in love with him too. And now the real problem arises as to the fathers of both the hero and heroine had certain demands. Mary’s father wanted her to marry a Knanaya Christian boy and Happy’s father wanted no relation with Kerala. How the couple convinces their families to agree to this marriage is the story of Happy Singh.

If you look at the movies I mentioned in the first paragraph, they all sort of created a bunch of movies that were similar to them. The problem is that Happy Sardar is not even trying to achieve the emotional depth of those movies. Even if you are a lover of those films, this film doesn’t have much to excite you. Every character is way too thin in terms of depth and it feels like they created a random list of movie moments from those ‘90s movies and made a script out of it. The climax of Happy Sardar is an excruciatingly painful experience and this is that movie where you won’t have any suggestions to make it any better.

Kalidas Jayaram is trying desperately to be funny, charming and likable. The short of confidence performance becomes even worse when the directors decided to make him do his mimicry at every point in the film. Merin Philip who portrayed the role of Mary is probably going to stay in the business for some more time. She knew the pitch of the character and as she was always there with Kalidas in almost all frames, we could clearly see the difference between overacting and normal acting. Siddique was comfortable being the concerned father. Javed Jaffrey was okay. Mala Parvathy and Praveena played the roles of the mothers. Balu, Zinil, Vijilesh, Sreenath Bhasi, Siddhi, Anoop Chandran, etc are there in the elaborate cast and it was actually the pointless character played by Sharafudheen that gave the audience some relief.

As directors, Sudip and Geethika is not trying to create a solid enough base for the story or characters. From one line to scene order and then to a fully-fledged script is a method some people follow to write scripts and Happy Sardar seems like a movie that never went beyond the scene order phase. The tribute like a recreation of familiar scenes would only work if you have proper content that will convince the audience. It is really tough to believe that Abhinandan Ramanujam has done the cinematography for this movie. Edits are terrible and the music placement is very awkward.

Towards the end of this film, I was frequently looking at the watch to know when they will end this exhibition of mediocrity. But Sudip and Geethika go on and on with their outdated script and people started walking out. Last but not least, can we please reduce Mohanlal references in movies just for the sake of petty claps.


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