Rating: 1.5 stars

Director: Prabhu Dheva

Cast: Shahid Kapoor, Sonakshi Sinha, Sonu Sood, Ashish Vidyarthi

Our bruised and battered protagonist is being dragged in the dark woods by a pack of goons. Every audience member who has been fed on a steady diet of commercial Hindi cinema knows that the hero will find a way to emerge victorious despite the overwhelming odds.

On that introductory scene and note, we are taken into a long flashback, starting from the day Romeo Rajkumar (Shahid Kapoor) sets foot in small town Dhartipur. A pacey montage, slightly reminiscent of Gangs of Wasseypur, establishes the town’s notoriety for growing opium as well as the rivalry between the two clans of Manik Parmar (Ashish Vidyarthi) and Shivraj Gurjar (Sonu Sood) who seek an upper hand in the business.

Romeo Rajkumar manages to entrench himself firmly in the Gurjar group after saving Shivraj’s life on two different occasions and toppling over vehicles, since such seems to be the necessity of the genre. While performing nefarious deeds, our hero lives up to his ‘Romeo’ moniker by unabashedly pursuing Chanda (Sonakshi Sinha), who is later revealed to be Manik Parmar’s niece. Despite being lovingly brow-beaten into submission by the leading man, she becomes an unwilling pawn in a truce between Parmar and Shivraj, when her engagement to the latter is announced. The wedding day is on Dussehra.

In an invocation of his masculinity, Romeo vows to marry Chanda on the same day, in the same ‘mandap’. How he sets about to do so forms the rest of an already predictable and formulaic plot.

Unlike his previous release, the light and entertaining Ramaiya Vastavaiya, director Prabhu Dheva has fallen prey to the consistent pattern of ‘pyaar, pyaar, pyaar’ and ‘maar, maar, maar’. It seems unimaginable for filmmakers to make a watchable romantic-action film with elaborate song-dance routines, exploding cars, flying bikes and villains who flit from place to place in a cavalcade of SUVs. But these filmi tropes reveal a paucity of just that – the imagination.

Shahid Kapoor does what he can, with his graceful moves and over-exaggerated fight scenes. Sonakshi Sinha has precious little to do, other than playing the Damsel in Distress. For a character who initially seems a firebrand, her Chanda regresses into the folds of the ‘ablaa naari’, when she falls for the hero.
Neither Shahid nor Sonakshi seem to make a perfect pair but at least the makers touch upon that point when Romeo and Chanda spar over their height-weight issues.

Sonu Sood is delightfully menacing and occasionally comic, with a great form to boot. So is Ashish Vidyarthi, on the first two counts, though watching him shirtless is a bit of an eyesore. Asrani is wasted as Shivraj’s astrologer in the film.

The music by Pritam Chakraborty is engaging. Saree Ke Fall Sa is the most hummable song in the film. Gandi Baat is catchy too. If only Prabhu Dheva had a longer guest appearance in the song.

The action scenes are the usual run-of-the-mill fare. And most of the editing (Ballu Saluja), though sharp, features dramatized, shaky zoom-ins and quick cuts, which are already peculiar to the masala fare these days.
If you haven’t already had your fill of the mind-numbing action movies in recent times, you might just turn up to watch this one. Otherwise, you miss nothing when you give R… Rajkumar a miss.