In the end, the notion of a film about an undervalued genre of musicians is more compelling than “Banjo” itself. It starts out from a promising place, but fails to make any leaps or strides.

Banjo has practically no redeeming features. It is about a NRI musician’s (Nargis Fakhri) search for an original sound which leads her to the banjo artist Tarraat (Riteish Deshmukh) and his rag-tag band, and what happens next.

It’s a film by someone who can see Mumbai with indigenous eyes. Scratch the filters and it’s as raw as it always was.
Show patience in the second half, and it may work for you. There’s a lot to like in Banjo.

‘Banjo’ is a light-hearted entertainer which is just like any other music based film. Looks like, the filmmaker was trying hard to match up to the standards set by ‘Rock On’ but fails to do so. The film is certainly a one time watch.

Banjo makes a winsome start but takes an awfully tedious route to achieve its happily ever after…

Rarely does a film press so much noise into service to achieve so little in the end. Heed this warning: don’t get within the earshot of Banjo.

If you are familiar with Mumbai’s working-class neighbourhoods, where the hearts of the poor are bigger than the pay packages of those residing in the mushrooming high-rises, you’ll be able to notice the beauty of Banjo. It also makes you respect the street musicians a little more.

An incoherent script magnifies this problem, and pulls “Banjo” down into a quagmire from which even Deshmukh, for all his screen presence, cannot rescue it.

For a film about music none of the tracks scored by Vishal-Shekhar make an impression, with a few being indistinguishable from the other thanks to Jadhav’s extravagant staging and Bosco-Caesar’s uninspiring choreography. Banjo limps to its 137-minute running time leaving the viewers not high on great music but low on a listless outing.

Banjo could be termed as the most boring music-based film ever! It is a haphazard film that tests your patience until the end!

Banjo gets a bit lost in its ambition. This movie aspires to be a marriage of Marathi and Hindi culture, it even tries to tie in International music culture with traditional Indian values. But in its attempt to be so many things all at once, it never manages to focus on one aspect – the core story. The underdog story is a proven winner in cinema, but this movie just misses the right note.

BANJO at the most and in all generosity is a TIME PASS only if you love Riteish Deshmukh more than anything else.

Banjo’ packs in so many hero-villain, poor-rich type clichés, and so much melodrama, from the time-tested rule-book, that even if you didn’t bother watching the film, you’d know what happens. Yeah, you’ve been there, seen that; why watch this same kinda picture again?

Interesting music pieces(Vishal-Shekhar), a furiously implosive background score(SouravRoy) and a principal cast that believes in the plot’s quintessential rags-to-riches logic tends to keep the storytelling afloat.However Banjo is unlikely to set the  boxoffice on fire. Its energy remains half-doused by over-statement.

Banjo does have a few catchy songs to which you can groove, but some parts of the plot are cliched and the others are too random. Don’t be surprised if you switch your brain cells off in the first 30 minutes.

Music composers Vishal-Shekhar contribute a few foot-tapping numbers to Banjo, but everything else in the film is a drag. Only for Riteish Deshmukh fans. The rest can give Banjo a miss. 

Banjo is a feel-good film with great music and performances. Riteish Deshmukh is more than paisa-wasool.

Banjo would have been a really good entertainer, if the film had stuck to what the title had promised, instead of straying to other subplots. If you are a Mumbaikar then this is a one time watch for you.

While Banjo should ideally have been a showcase for Deshmukh to flex his acting muscles in a solo hero project, this film struck all the wrong notes for me.

The one thing Ravi does flawlessly is celebrating the city of Mumbai, its indomitable spirit, its unending vibrancy, its energy, all of these find a perfect homage in the movie. The camaraderie between characters is earthen. A special mention for Vishal and Shekhar who deliver a terrific, well-synced album after long. There are far and few moments of brilliance in the film but in its better parts, you see the glimpse of the maverick filmmaker who deserves to be given another chance by Bollywood.

Like ABCD, Banjo relies on a song dedicated to Ganesha to win audiences over in the climax. The track Om Ganapataye Namaha Deva is a doozy, but it proves yet again than a rousing prayer to the remover of obstacles is powerless in the face of limited imagination.

Vishal Shekhar give in peppy music and the background score gets loud at times. However, there is nothing really great about it. Mediocre and predictable is how we would describe the film. Probably Jadhav wanted to go safe with his first outing, but we thought he could have waited a little more and given us a film as endearing as his Marathi outings.

While the first half of the film is simply super, the second half undoes a lot of the expectations. The high emotional quotient drains away into cliché-ridden melodrama, abrupt ends to some threads and a truly hurried ending. Such endings usually are caused by unsure scripts and directions or severe budgetary constraints, but here it looks as if some practical exigencies led to such contretemps, like, maybe, Nargis Fakhri’s absence from India for a while!