Dunki

Hirani loves to make a film with a message — particularly one in which characters repeatedly declare the message in voiceovers, monologues, and songs. The forward momentum suffers from this, and from sections that are quickly explained via narration but otherwise skipped over. In the end, 'Dunki' undermines its own messaging, sandwiching a series of informative cards about donkey flights between a rushed conclusion and comedic coda.

DUNKI bears the Rajkumar Hirani stamp of filmmaking with the right message and emotions.

Director Rajkumar Hirani takes time to find his feet. It's only in the second half, which has more dramatic and emotional scenes, that we feel the sure-footedness of the Hirani of old. The film rests solely on the shoulders of the performers and they all have brought their A game to the table.

Dunki is high on ambition but its flimsy premise renders this nearly three hours long journey into farfetched adventures hard to believe, harder to buy into. The film-maker's tendency to get carried away and pull out all the stops to reach out to the emotional fools in the audience tries a tad too hard in Dunki.

To see Dunki, then, is to stare into this chasm with a lethargic vertigo. The central flux of the story itself is never convincing. Once he exits the film's stage, the second half becomes an emotional wasteland, lulling without tension, humour, or pathos.

Laced with director Rajkumar Hirani's signature style, Dunki rides high on emotions, with humour peppered in quantity that at times get too much to digest. Definitely not one of the best works from Hirani, yet Dunki effortlessly manages to keep you hooked.

Hirani and longtime collaborator Abhijat Joshi and Kanika Dhillon build simple ideas into comic set pieces that ripple into other scenes, a system of delayed punchlines and callbacks that's more formally impressive than actually funny. The problem with construction this meticulous is you can't help but see scaffolding everywhere. Dunki is a vacuum-packed 161 minutes, so bent on utilizing every moment that its very industry becomes oppressive.

Dunki is more heehaw than ha ha hee hee. Broad comedy and tear-jerking moments – Hirani's strengths – are largely missing from his screenplay, written along with Abhijat Joshi and Kanika Dhillon. In the absence of compelling character arcs or a halfway realistic depiction of the complications involved in transporting humans across borders, the movie never travels below the surface.

The purpose and social concern is again laudable but the storytelling feels facile and laboured after a point, largely because Hirani doesn't want to test newer ways to put his point across. The spontaneity that we associate with his work is sadly missing.