First thing first, Jagga Jasoos is not for everyone. It’s a colourful, fun adventure movie, like a mix between Tintin and Indiana Jones, made for kids and adults with minds of a kid. It’s also Bollywood’s first ever musical movie, meaning almost all the dialogues in this movie are in songs.
Jagga (Ranbir Kapoor) is an orphan who has speech impediment – he stammers. He gets adopted by Tutifuti Bagchi (Saswata Chatterjee), who gives him the idea to sing instead of speaking, seeing he doesn’t stammer when he sings. That propels the movie to turn into a full on musical.
Jagga is a schoolboy with a knack for investigation, which will no doubt remind many viewers of Kishore Pasha of the Tin Goyenda series. We accompany him in his various adventures in his hometown Manipur, in Kolkata, and in strange lands in Africa. Journalist Shruti Sengupta (Katrina Kaif) helps him out along the way.
The movie is visually stunning. Every frame is captured beautifully, and is often presented like comic book pages. Director Anurag Basu created a fantasy land in his previous movie Barfi, and Jagga Jasoos continues with that fantasy. He is a visionary and his vision comes through in every frame. The two people who help tremendously in bringing Basu’s vision to life are lead actor Ranbir and music director Pritam.
Ranbir once again proves why he is one of the best actors ever, playing the role of a schoolboy masterfully. Pritam’s music is the life of this musical movie, which is certainly a mammoth achievement, seeing the soundtrack and songs fill the 167 minutes length of the film. Saswata Chatterjee is brilliant too in his role. He evokes emotion with his sincere portrayal of the father figure. Katrina’s comic timing is great throughout the movie. And of course, Ranbir-Katrina makes a very good looking pair. On the downside though, some of Katrina’s dialogs are dubbed and they sound really odd.
All in all, if you are a kid, for real or by heart, and open to a completely new style of Hindi cinema, you probably will love Jagga Jasoos. At 167 minutes, the movie does kinda drag at the end, but still a journey I personally would love to take many times more. Highly recommended, but personally I would wait for the good print to become available.
Thursday, March 20, 2025
