Cast: Neena Gupta, Arjun Kapoor, Rakul Preet, John Abraham, Aditi Rao Hydari

Director: Kaashvie Nair

Sardar Ka Grandson has an interesting premise but the makers don't take it seriously and fill the film all the Bollywood cliches and make it a mess. 

Arjun Kapoor plays Amreek, a man who runs a movers and packers business in Los Angeles with his girlfriend Radha, played by Rakul Preet Singh. Blinded by some sort of male entitlement, he lashes out at her one day after she points out legitimate flaws in his personality and work ethic. His ego bruised beyond repair, he flies down to his home town Amritsar, where he learns that his grandmother, played by Neena Gupta under three inches of prosthetics, is about to die.

Her last wish is to see her ancestral home in Lahore, and she asks Amreek to take her there. But when the Pakistani authorities deny her a visa, he comes up with the most harebrained scheme this side of Armageddon. Amreek, after watching a YouTube video, decides that his only option is to literally 'go to Pakistan' by himself, and somehow physically transport his grandmother’s old house across the border. Honestly, what else could you expect from a guy who’s named after a Murthal dhaba and openly admits to eating pizzas with achaar?

Amreek’s diplomatic mission includes getting arrested almost immediately after entering Pakistan, consuming bootlegged alcohol, and bonding with locals over song-and-dance sequences. He does all this with Resting Arjun Face.

To the director’s credit, Sardar Ka Grandson works because of its core idea but then the actors fail the project. It’s heartening to see Kaashvie Nair attempting something as audacious as uprooting a house and then re-planting it in Amritsar, but the scenes demand more urgency from the actors. Most of the times, they look relaxed and don’t convey the earnestness the situation merits.

They also remain short of establishing delectable chaos inside Sardar’s house. I am not even talking about the fun quotient here, which is mostly missing.

Neena Gupta and Arjun Kapoor try to shoulder the responsibility but couldn’t do so for a longer period. It needed more secondary characters to rise up and take guard. With De De Pyaar De, Rakul Preet has proved that she could be quite handy in situational comedies, but she has been grossly underutilised.

John Abraham and Aditi Rao Hydari’s cameos could have been extended. They look more in charge of the developments than the lead pair. Hydari, in particular, has evolved a lot in recent times, and this is another good performance from her.

At 139-minutes, Sardar Ka Grandson feels like a stretch, but you can always watch it for Neena Gupta and the audacity of the idea.

You can watch this film on Netflix.