Movie reviews: Hollywood and Indie, specializing in independent comedies, dramas, thrillers and romance.
Friday, September 30, 2022
Plan A Plan B: Movie Review
Not fresh or original or funny.
Plan A Plan B is an opposites attract Bollywood romantic comedy. Nirali (Tamannaah Bhatia) is a single matchmaker; she has a degree in psychology and has followed into her mother’s footsteps who ran a matchmaking business and got new office space for Nirali. The office space is shared with a family lawyer, Kosty (Riteish Deshmukh), who specializes in divorce.
2022
Directed by: Shashanka Ghosh
Screenplay by: Rajat Arora
Starring: Tamannaah Bhatia, Riteish Deshmukh
Nirali is outraged since she doesn’t believe that divorce should be advertised before the marriage has even happened. Kosty just calls it Plan B. Some people are happier married, others are happier divorced. A one size fits all office space. Apparently, none of their clients even noticed, it was just Nirali who was pissed off.
The editing telegraphs the jokes in advance. The comedy in this movie is not particularly funny but if you know what jokes are coming, they are even less funny. There’s nothing new or fresh here, which is not a problem for rom-coms as long as they are funny and romantic. The few laughs are more groans since we’re operating at a pretty low level of comedy. The main characters end up growing too tiring to really care if they’re going to live happily ever after or not.
Nirali is enjoyable. Her significant other tragically died and she’s just happy being single. Or so she says. Her family spends all their time trying to find a match for her since they don’t believe her when she says she’s happy. I was really looking forward to a romantic comedy heroine who is happy being single, so this insistence from her family is annoying.
Nirali is the free-spirited one, and you’ve guessed it, Kosty is her exact opposite. He’s arrogant, has obsessive compulsive disorder, he doesn’t compromise, and rarely meets anyone worth being nice too. He’s not a pleasant character. The writers spent so long crafting Nirali as a fun, charming, good person, and then just said the genre dictates that Kosty must be her opposite and then didn’t spend any effort creating a fun and charming character out of him. Nirali deserves whatever she wants, but few people are actually going to think that she should be with Kosty.
The ending is a very Bollywood ending. Fifteen minutes of song and dance at a birthday dance party where their relationship is telegraphed in dance moves and then the story just jumps ahead a thousand steps.
Plan A and Plan B is cute and fun at times, but mostly it’s a not very funny, not well written romantic comedy between two mismatched people.
