It’s disappointing especially when you have a National Award filmmaker making a film that is so clichéd to say the least. Banjo is directed by the Marathi films acclaimed director Ravi Jadhav.
The movie starts with a dedication to all the street musicians followed by a Vijay Raaz giving a voice-over for the lead characters. Chris (Nargis Fakri) is a musician in New York. She hears a banjo-based tune sent by her recordist friend in India. He records this tune during a Ganpati Bappa procession. Chris is impressed and is desperate to collaborate with those Banjo musicians for music competition. She comes to India in search of them. The band she is in search of, is not a band, but a bunch of needy part-timers who play music to make some extra bucks. Taarat (Ritiesh Deshmukh) is the lead among the bunch. Chris meets Taarat under different circumstances but she doesn’t know that he is the one she she’s looking for. At the same time, Taarat also doesn’t let her know that he is a Banjo-player as the instrument doesn’t attract any respect. The rest of the film is about how Chris and this Banjo group together make it big, and the impediments.
The movie is primarily based on music and all the tunes plus the background score music sucked big time in the film. The tracks are not even remotely decent. Vishal and Shekar having given some biggest hits in the last many years, haven’t given a single good track for the genre the movie is based upon. Banjo instrument is used in the theme song which comes excessively and it echoes irritatingly in your ears even after you come out of the hall.
The movie takes itself very casually. There can be so much intensity added to the story, but the movie tries to be funny, peppy and easy-going. The jokes are hardly funny. The dialogues and the moments are very clichéd. For eg,g Nargis Fakri starts walking in tiny shorts in a slum, and all the people on the road enter into a slow motion word and messing up whatever they are currently upto. Haven’t we seen this umpteen number of times? The complete film is mostly filled with such mundane moments.
Performances wise, there is hardly anything to talk about sparing the guy who plays the local politician. He was spot on. Ritiesh Deshmukh was hardly engaging and Fakri was hopeless.
The writing could have had more depth. It’s so superficial and you are extremely bored with the characters.
Overall, Banjo is a very bad film and stands amongst the worst screenplays.
