Be Happy - mere papa, en appa, ek superhero hain

 

Be Happy

Hindi, 2025

Genre: Family Drama

Where to watch: Amazon Prime

Director: Remo D'Souza

Stars: Abhishek Bachchan, Inayat Verma, Nora Fatehi, Nassar, Harleen Sethi

Mohan's Measure: ⭐

There is one thing that big Bollywood movies tend to forget when making movies about children...kids. Inayat Verma's tweenage character handles her situations with an irritating sense of manipulation and self interest, convincing her father to leave the relative peace of Ooty and move to the Big City, so that she can learn hip hop dance and become a contestant on one of the many reality TV shows spun off from American Idol and America's Got Talent.

Talent is what we would expect from Mr. Bachchan and Mr. Nassar, but neither seems to want to present that to us right now.  Instead, Mr. Bachchan decides to put aside his stoicism in moments of dance routines, a skill for which he is not best known, nor has improved upon significantly. As for Mr. Nassar, he serves to be the archetype of the bumbling Madrasi, spending most of the movie drinking and being overtly boisterous.

The North-South divide is brought out a lot in this movie, as Mr. Nassar assumes the name Nadar  and intersperses his Hindi with Tamil phrases.  If this is what they are expecting of the South, I will stick to English, thank you.  Oh, and we get to see him dance too, if only to further him as a clodhopper, such that he is injured and dear old dad can be brought to the fore.

For actual dance, there is Ms. Fatehi, whom we remember from the steamy "Manohari" song in Bahubali 1. Her dance skills are no less impressive, but her acting is atrocious. 

And so too is the story, a very tried and true method attempting to capture our heart, but failing to catch our attention.