What’s Bad: Nothing is perfect, especially cinema – it’s subjective. What I like might be disliked by many but it’s the after effect of the movie that stays with people & Sanju will have a strong one. Apart from all the brightness, the movie had the scope of digging even deeper in the star’s life but it’s okay because whatever we get is more than what we ask from a film.
Loo Break: Have you ever taken one in any Rajkumar Hirani film? You’ve your answer!
Watch or Not? : I wish I can modify this question to When to watch? And my answer to that will be RIGHT AFTER READING THIS REVIEW!
As everyone by now know Sanju revolves around the roller coaster emotional ride of a Bollywood star – Sanjay Dutt. It starts with Sanjay Dutt aka Sanju ( Ranbir Kapoor) being out on Parole from his custody for illegally possessing arms at his house. His wife Maanayata Dutt ( Dia Mirza) contacts Winnie ( Anushka Sharma) , a renowned biographer to pen a book on his life. The family wanted to bring out the real & clean image of Sanju in-front of the world.
The graph of the movie travels through various timelines. First of which is – How Sanju actually became Sanju & he how became the drug-addict. Introducing his close friend Kamlesh Kanhaiyalal Kapasi ( Vicky Kaushal) and another friend Zubin ( Jim Sarbh) , the movies gets forward to another phase – how Sanju was called a terrorist. Was it all the allegations or did Sanju really commited something he shouldn’t have, that’s what Rajkumar Hirani explores in rest of the film.
Script Analysis
Halfway into the movie and you feel how Ranbir Kapoor is not acting, he’s living Sanjay Dutt. He’s not the actor, he’s the man who he’s playing. Rajkumar Hirani & Abhijat Joshi have a formula they follow; every important scene has three important things – drama, emotions & fun.
If you follow the filmography of Hirani, you’ll see how Munnabhai brings in the memory of having chinese at 3am in an emotional confrontation scene with Circuit ( Arshad Warsi) , you’ll see how Farhan ( R. Madhavan) and Raju ( Sharman Joshi) strip down their pants for ‘jahapana’ Rancho ( Aamir Khan) after a super-emotional scenes & you’ll see how in the heart-wrenching climax PK ( Aamir Khan) tells Jaggu ( Anushka Sharma) that he’s not in love with her to ‘bhaste’ the time thinking about her.
Hirani, Joshi have been living off this formula throughout their filmography and Sanju is no exception. Yes, this is a biopic and everyone knows the major part of it but it takes a Hirani to make even what you already know interesting. He concentrates entirely on the drug addicted phase in the first half & on the comeback of Sanjay Dutt from jail in the second. Yes, there are loopholes in the second which should’ve been covered by Hirani but as I said no movie can be perfect.