Seriously, it isn’t funny when you see a middle-aged Naren (Ajay Devgan), a divorcing 38-year-old bank manager coiffed and perfumed to appear younger, happily foisting himself as an oddball in a bunch of twenty-somethings just to woo the cutesy 21-year-old intern June Pinto (Shazahn Padamsee) he has a crush on.
Nor is it amusing to earhole Milind Kelkar’s (Omi Vaidya) inventive poetry. A true-blue romantic at heart and still a virgin at thirty, Milind falls for a brutally ambitious radio jockey Gungun (Shraddha Das) and spouts poetic gems like “usse dekhte hi ghantiya baji dil mein, woh bhi Dolby Digital sound mein.” Trump that, anyone!
Slightly amusing are the shenanigans of the playboyish Abhay (Emraan Hashmi), a blissfully out-of-job gym instructor who woos a millionaire and much-married former beauty queen Anushka (Tisca Chopra) for money and material comforts but ends up falling in love with her step daughter Nikki (Shruti Haasan). Juggling the mother-daughter duo like a jockey astride two mares, he goes to woo the social activist Nikki in one sequence and willy-nilly ends up on a cot, doing not what he wanted, but donating blood.
It’s these little funny crackles that make Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji worth sitting through once. The movie isn’t a laugh riot it might have been, but it has some engaging moments - like the one where Naren waits in the car outside his office to give a lift to June, but she is zipped away on the motorbike by a young dude. Or the ones where a thrifty Milind haggles with a flower-seller to put extra lilies and roses in the bouquet for his unloving premika Gungun. Or the one in which he reads the farewell letter from her.
The film is also saved by its actors. Ajay Devgan, playing the embarrassingly-in-love Naren, braying out the karaoke “Koi hota jisko apna, hum apna keh lete yaaro” and turning mealy-mouthed in front of the pretty girl he loves, is a delight to watch. Omi Vaidya as the self-sacrificing lover is creditable while Emraan Hashmi could have played the role of a philanderer even in half sleep. What particularly works is the chemistry between the trio, living together under the same roof they consider lucky for their love lives.
Among girls, Shazahn does look appealing and performs well, at least better than Shruti Haasan, who appears just before the interval and is mostly busy spouting idealistic spiels about charity and debunking the ‘India Rising’ myth. Tisca Chopra and Shradda Das come up with best performances of the fairer lot.
At the end of the day, Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji is a film about unrequited love, heartbreaks, and renewed hopes. A virgin territory for Bhandarkar, it does pack in some crass gay gags and ribald humour with dialogues about losing one’s ‘V’ (you know what). But it all patches up tolerably in the end.
Give it a shot only if you are in the mood for some ticklish fun.
Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
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