Rajkumar Hirani (in the middle) and his same same but different leads. Image: Twitter/Vishu Vinod Chopra Films

I have a friend. Let’s call him Ramesh.

He’s a smart, sensitive person, and I know this because whenever there’s a lull at a house party (mostly because of someone or the other’s passive-aggressive significant other), Ramesh is going to come through with an oddball story and pierce through the tension to save the day. He is also occasionally chased by cops after trying to buy maal (weed). On one such instance, he slipped and broke his foot. He was so charming that the cops took him to the hospital. Ramesh has also incidentally been dumped for having a bad haircut.

Ramesh, in essence, is a poor man’s Rajkumar Hirani. He saves us from awkward social moments of discussing the latest Salman Khan film, so we give him a free pass for telling us stories that collapse faster than Kevin Spacey’s house of cards were we to question their logic.

All is not well. Image: Vidhu Vinod Chopra Films

I arrived at this conclusion at about 5 AM the morning before the release of Hirani’s latest would be gangbanger Sanju, where Hirani has decided to make a film about Sanjay Dutt, a dude convicted in the great nation of India, for possession of illegal weapons in the 1993 Mumbai blasts, when 257 lives were lost.

Sanju though, as anyone with half a brain cell and Komal Nahta (the country’s favourite film trade analyst) will tell you, will be a superhit. Hirani is the poster-boy for the I-Get-Great-Reviews- _And_-Make-Money brigade, so much so that even Karan Johar, destroyer of socially relevant films like Sairat, is envious of Hirani’s ability to make “socially relevant blockbusters”.

But the problem is that Hirani’s films are neither social nor relevant. They are simply the same film, made over and over again in a fantastical dreamland trying to tackle real world problems and falling apart at the slightest doubt—much like my guy Ramesh’s tall tales..

Story telling. What story telling?

Every Hirani film is based on an innocuous outsider coming to our supposed fucked-up world, and seeing it without the hang-ups we have. Aamir Khan’s alien in PK doesn’t understand organised religion, Aamir Khan’s Rancho in 3 Idiots doesn’t understand why we settle in life, and Sanjay Dutt’s socialist Munnabhai in Munnabhai MBBS doesn’t understand the norms and rules that deny medical assistance to those in dire need of it.

These are all noble pursuits, but why the fuck are these people doing it? What is motivating these one dimensional characters? I mean is Aamir Khan’s alien just doing everything just to hang out with Anushka Sharma?

We think we’re friends with Hirani’s leads, because they seem harmless and make shockingly objective observations (deja vu from Alien Observations). But we still don’t know what makes them tick. In 3 Idiots, why is Rancho, a genius, so hell bent on telling his friends what dreams to chase? So much so that he would screw over a girl he has no intention of being with? And why does he, as a kid, just wander into classrooms and solve math problems? Why does Munnabhai, a kid with aspirations of being a doctor become Munnabhai, a thug with a heart who helps people?

In Sanju, the empty vessel-like behaviour of his leads reaches an apex, where Sanju, as explained by his friend Kamli (played by Vicky Kaushal), is only interested in, “eating, drinking and fucking”. Everything that happens to him in the film is a response to an external trigger—His drug habit begins with peer pressure and increases with his mum’s death, and he’s ‘forced’ into buying guns because someone tells him his father will be threatened.

I might be in the minority here, but it’s kinda important for character arcs and films to reflect an understanding of why someone does something. It’s how you empathise and identify with the character, even if he’s going around shirtless dodging rocket launchers. But Hirani likes playing god, using his leads as prophets to tell us mere mortals how wrong we are in our ‘presumptions’ about the world and its people.

Apparently no one has ever questioned paperwork, parental pressure, or organised religion before him. In the same vein, with Sanju, Hirani tackles the massively under-discussed issue of fake news.

Director and film lover. Image: Twitter/Rajkumar Hirani

In Sanju, the audience ‘has to’ realise that Sanjay Dutt in fact is a very nice person. This is achieved through Anushka Kapoor and Vicky Kaushal’s tears, as Sanjay Dutt tells them about a meeting they weren’t there for and that everything bad written about him was #FakeNews. #spoileralert.

In every Hirani film, the so-called baddie (usually played by Boman Irani), suddenly realises that everything they had done in their life was wrong, and now they must change as well. In Sanju, the lead is the baddie. His ‘change’ evolves via various songs his father makes him listen. Easy peasy.

You can test the validity of this exercise next time by trying to convince your youngest niece/nephew if they’d like to have vanilla ice-cream instead of chocolate. Let alone the successful old people in Hirani’s films, even 10-year-olds don’t change their opinion this quickly.

Confusion and chaos in the wake of Munnabhai. Image: Vidhu Vinod Chopra Films

Look Ma, I have so many colours

Apart from changing hearts and minds, Hirani doesn’t really change anything in his films, least of all visual representation. If we’re going to watch a film, and the reason isn’t the usual Salman bhai, or Shah Rukh-hugs-girl, or Akshay-loves-India, then it’s usually the filmmaker’s unique perspective, either through the story line or his visual interpretation of it.

Vishal Bhardwaj going to Rangoon after going to Kashmir? Check. Anurag Kashyap making a boxing movie in Uttar Pradesh amidst the Yogi revolution? Check. Zoya Akhtar making a short about the relationship between a maid and her fuckbuddy paymaster? Check.

These directors have approached their subjects with their own visual flair. Kashyap gives us his usual tracking shot of a boxer training at the Ganges in Mukkabaaz. Bhardwaj builds his own version of pre-Independance Mumbai in Rangoon, and Akhtar directs Bhoomi Pednekar so well that she makes dish-washing look like an art form in her Lust Stories short. Hirani’s films on the other hand have the same garish finish with lots of ‘realisation close-ups’ and bad VFX. Engineering students sitting and rubbing fluorescent ass chairs from 3 Idiots is still fresh in our memories. Ranbir Kapoor in Sanju even flushes a tiny Boman Irani down a toilet. So new, so creative.

In Sanju, the empty vessel-like behaviour of Hirani's leads reaches an apex. Image: Vishu Vinod Chopra Films

After hours of watching Hirani’s films back to back, his characters and his plot twists started to blend into one another, distinguishable only by the ‘mysterious problem’ each of them were solving—paperwork, religion, dreams, fake news—and now Sanju fits nicely into this mould, a dumb peg for a dumb hole.

At its best, it’s caricature of the actor, at its worst, it’s an extension of my friend Ramesh. Only Ramesh’s adventures and tall tales are much more fun. And at the very least, we’re very drunk by that time we get to them anyway.