Neeru Bajwa Archives – CULTURE MIX

Review: ‘Son of Sardaar 2,’ starring Ajay Devgn, Mrunal Thakur, Ravi Kishan and Sanjay Mishra

August 3, 2025

by Carla Hay

Vindu Dara Singh, Ajay Devgn, Mukul Dev and Ravi Kishan in “Son of Sardaar 2” (Photo courtesy of Panorama Studios)

Directed by Vijay Kumar Arora

Hindi with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in India, in London, and in Edinburgh, Scotland, the comedy film “Son of Sardaar 2” (a sequel to the 2012 film “Son of Sardaar”) features an Indian and Pakistani cast of characters (with some white people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: After their respective spouses leave them, a chicken farmer and female entertainer pretend to be married and hide her family’s Pakistani heritage so that the entertainer’s stepdaughter can be accepted by the wealthy Indian family of the stepdaughter’s boyfriend.

Culture Audience: “Son of Sardaar 2” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the movie’s headliners, the first “Son of Sardaar” movie, and overly long silly comedies.

Pictured clockwise, from left: Ajay Devgn, Roshni Walia, Mrunal Thakur, Ashwini Kalsekar, Ravi Kishan, Sahil Mehta, Mukul Dev, Vindu Dara Singh, Deepak Dobriyal and Kubbra Sait in “Son of Sardaar 2” (Photo courtesy of Panorama Studios)

“Son of Sardaar 2” collapses under the weight of its stupidity and bloated runtime of 147 minutes. This comedy sequel stretches its main concept (parodying tense India–Pakistan relations) to the breaking point with stale and unfunny ethnic jokes. “Son of Sardaar 2” also has a questionable depiction of a gender-non-conforming person, whose gender identity is mocked in an insensitive way.

Directed by Vijay Kumar Arora, “Son of Sardaar 2” was written by Jagdeep Singh Sidhu
and Mohit Jain. The movie is a stand-alone sequel to 2012’s “Son of Sardaar,” which was a remake of the 2010 Telugu film “Maryada Ramanna.” The first “Son of Sardaar” movie was terrible, and this sequel is not an improvement.

In “Son of Sardaar 2,” Ajay Devgn reprises his staring role as Jaswinder “Jassi” Singh Randhawa. In the first “Son of Sardaar” movie, he was set to marry Sukhmeet “Sukh” Kaur Sandhu (played by Sonakshi Sinha), but that relationship is not mentioned in “Son of Sardaar 2.” Instead, Jassi is married to a woman named Dimple (played by Neeru Bajwa), who is in their native India, while chicken farmer Jassi is in Scotland and trying to get a permanent resident visa for Dimple to live with him in Scotland. Jassi has been trying for 11 years to get this visa.

Jassi and Dimple do not have any children together. Jassi lives with his overprotective and religious Hindu mother Bebe (played by Dolly Ahluwalia), who calls him frequently when she’s not with him. And then, one day, Jassi’s wish comes true: Dimple’s visa gets approved.

When Jassi meets Dimple at the airport, Dimple is accompanied by two people: a man named Robin (played by Mohan Singh Randhawa) and a woman named Disha, whom Dimple introduces as a couple who are her friends. Jassi gets the shock of his life when Dimple tells Jassi that Robin is actually Dimple’s lover, and she doesn’t want to be married to Jassi anymore. Jassi takes the breakup very hard and is reluctant to get divorced.

Meanwhile, a Pakistani Muslim family of musical entertainers in Scotland also experience a bad breakup. Danish (played by Chunky Panday), the family patriarch, is a probable alcoholic who suddenly abandons the family: Danish’s wife Rabia (played by Mrunal Thakur); Rabia’s siblings Gul (played by Deepak Dobriyal) and Mehwish (played by Kubbra Sait); and Danish’s young-adult daughter Saba (played by Roshni Walia), who was born from Danish’s previous marriage. Saba’s biological mother is deceased.

The “meet cute” moment for Jassi and Rabia happens when Jassi is scheduled to have a lunch meeting at a restaurant with a female divorce lawyer who was recommended to him. Jassi doesn’t know what this attorney looks like, so when Rabia walks by, he wrongly assumes that Rabia is the attorney. Rabia is at the restaurant for a blind date, and she thinks that Jassi is her blind date.

When Jassi begins talking to Rabia about how much she charges for her services, Rabia slaps him in anger because she thinks that Jassi mistakenly believes that she’s a sex worker. The matter is resolved when the real divorce lawyer (played by Nav Ghotra) shows up. Jassi and Rabia develop a predictable attraction to each other. Jassi eventually meets the rest of Rabia’s boisterous family.

Saba and her boyfriend Goggi (played by Sahil Mehta) are madly in love with each other. However, Goggi’s wealthy Indian family—especially his father Raja (played by Ravi Kishan)—is very conservative and prejudiced against Pakistani people. Goggi’s family always has armed security guards nearby. Through a series of circumstances, Jassi and Rabia hatch a plan to pretend to be a married Indian couple, in order for Saba to be accepted into Goggi’s family. Many ridiculous hijinks then pollute the movie.

The other members of Goggi’s family are Raja’s meddling and judgmental brothers Tony (played by Mukul Dev, in his last film role before he died in May 2025) and Tittu (played by Vindu Dara Singh), who had the same roles in the first “Son of Sardaar” movie; Raja’s wife/Goggi’s mother Premlata (played by Ashwini Kalsekar); Raja’s father Ranjit Singh (played by Sharat Saxena); and Ranjit’s wife Kim (played by Emma Kate Vansittart), who barely says anything in the movie.

Goggi’s elderly grandmother Kim used to be a pole dancer when she was young. As already revealed in the “Son of Sadaar” trailer, Kim does a pole-dancing performance that goes horribly wrong because she falls and dies. (Mia Lacey Redmond is the pole-dancing body double in this scene.) Jassi is the only witness to this accident. And he’s terrified of being blamed for Kim’s death, so there are more lies and cover-ups.

The Singh family has a buffoonish longtime neighbor named Bantu Pandey (played by Sanjay Mishra), a milk delivery person, who shows up fairly late in the movie, when wedding preparations have been made for Goggi and Saba. Bantu is part of a plot twist in the movie. This plot twist is a desperate attempt to salvage a misguided story.

“Son of Sardaar 2” has fairly good cinematography, but the movie’s production design is garish. A few of the not-funny-at-all gags involve a certain tea that has intoxicating/hallucinatory effects on anyone who drinks it. (You can easily guess that Jassi will be one of the people who drinks this tea.) The movie has some cartoonish animation to portray little aliens taking over brain cells when this tea is consumed. It all looks so tacky.

The rest of “Son of Sardaar 2” is a repeat loop of mind-numbing slapstick and scenarios where Jassi has to pretend that he was a jingoistic military colonel who fought against Pakistanis because it’s one of many lies that he nervously tells hard-to-please Raja. Meanwhile, Rabia and her family pretend to be Indians who are xenophobic against Pakistanis. Gul is either a transgender woman or gender-fluid (the movie never says which), but is not a drag queen. The movie makes Gul’s gender identity a joke when Gul says things such as Gul is a woman on the outside but a man on the inside.

The exaggerated performances in “Son of Sardaar 2” can best be described as “trying too hard to be funny in an embarrassingly horrible movie.” “Son of Sardaar 2” is an endurance test of bad comedy and bombastic song-and-dance numbers with unimpressive songs, including a horrendous scene where several ghosts come out of a graveyard to sing and dance with the main characters. Avoid this irritating film, unless you enjoy having a movie insult your intelligence for nearly two-and-a-half hours.

Panorama Studios released “Son of Sardaar 2” in select U.S. cinemas and in India on August 1, 2025.

Review: ‘Sardaar Ji 3,’ starring Diljit Dosanjh, Neeru Bajwa, Jasmin Bajwa, Hania Aamir, Gulshan Grover and Manav Vij

June 29, 2025

by Carla Hay

“Sardaar Ji 3”

Directed by Amar Hundal

Punjabi with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in India and in England, the comedy horror film “Sardaar Ji 3” (the third movie in the “Sardaar Ji” series) features a predominantly Asian cast of characters (with a few white people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: An arrogant ghost hunter is hired to find a ghost for a gangster family, as the ghost hunter is torn between a rivalry between his new female paranormal hunter partner and his longtime ghost witch partner.

Culture Audience: “Sardaar Ji 3” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the “Sardaar Ji” movies, the movie’s headliners and silly horror comedies.

Manav Vij in “Sardaar Ji 3” (Photo courtesy of White Hill Studios)

With a flimsy plot bogged down by awful jokes, the bloated horror comedy sequel “Sardaar Ji 3” is dead on arrival. It has an outdated and sexist way of handling a love triangle between a ghost hunter, his longtime witch love and an ambitious paranormal investigator. “Sardaar Ji 3” is an example of a third movie in a series being much worse then its two predecessors.

Directed by Amar Hundal and written by Dheeraj Rattan, “Sardaar Ji 3” is a follow-up to 2015’s “Sardaarji” and 2016’s “Sardaarji 2.” Rattan wrote all three movies, which all have Diljit Dosanjh starring as Sardaar Jaggi Ji, the titular ghost hunter. Rohit Jugraj directed “Sardaarji” and “Sardaarji 2.” The change in directors for “Sardaar Ji 3” might have a lot to do with why this movie is the worst of the three, but it still doesn’t excuse the horrible screenplay.

The plot of “Sardaar Ji 3” is so thin, it could’ve been made into a short film. Instead, “Sardaar Ji 3” is stretched out to a 134-minute endurance test of a movie that repeats the same types of jokes, as if this repetition is supposed to make the movie funnier. It actually has the opposite effect: The movie becomes more irrirating as it goes along.

In “Sardaar Ji 3,” Sardaar finds out that someone else has been using his business name to get hired for ghost hunting. This imposter is a woman named Noor (played by Hania Aamir), who is so desperate to become a paranormal investigator that she committed this fraud. When Sardaar finds out what Noor did, at first, he angry. But then, because he’s attracted to Noor, he decides that they should be partners in the ghost-hunting business.

Meanwhile, Sardaar has been living with the glamorous ghost witch Pinki (played by Neeru Bajwa), whom he fell in love with in the first “Sardaarji” movie. Pinki leads a coven of 10 other ghost witches, who serve very little purpose in the movie except to echo Pinki’s thoughts. Pinki and her coven have been helping Sardaar with his ghost-hunting business.

But when Pinki finds out about Noor and the fact that Noor was able to get Sardaar to agree to have Noor as his equal busness partner, Pinki predictably gets very jealous. Pinki als demands at least one-third of whatever earning that Sardaar and Noor get. Lots of noisy and irritating arguments ensue.

Sardaar s caught in the middle. It doesn’t help that he and Noor begin dating and fall in love with each other. This is one of the things Sardaar says in response to this messy love triangle: “Girls and witches are the same. They just want to control men and have men wrapped around them.”

Noor gets an offer of £100,000 to go to a castle in England and find a ghost for the family who lives there. When Sardaar hears about this job, he decides to go to England too. They don’t find out until it’s too late that the family who hired them is a family of gangsters.

The chief villain is KK (played by Manav Vij), who is looking for the ghost of his identical twin JK (also played by Vij), so the ghost of JK can tell KK where JK’s lost corpse can be found because diamond are hidden in the corpse. KK’s brother-in-law Kala Lohoria (played by Gulshan Grover) is looking for JK’s ghost too for the same reason and because he also wants the diamonds for himself.

The movie’s mediocre song-and-dance numbers add nothing worthwhile to the story. Everything in “Sardaar Ji 3” is a jumble of bad slapstick comedy, sloppy editing, tacky visual effects and characters that are mostly unlikable. Dosanjhi gives a performance that’s more annoying than amusing. Out of all the principal cast members in “Sardaar Ji 3,” Aamir has the movie’s worst performance, because her acting in the movie is very unnatural and over-exaggerated. Bajwa doesn’t do much but act like a haughty diva.

The love triangle is resolved in exactly the way you would expect in a movie that treats a coven of witches as mere sidelined advisors to the male “hero” protagonist. And, of course, the ending also hints that there will be another sequel. “Sardaar Ji 3” was banned for release in India because Aamir is Pakistani, amid tense political relations between India and Pakistan. India is not missing much by not having “Sardaar Ji 3” available for an official release because “Sardaar Ji 3” just another in a long list of worthless movie sequels that are inferior to the original movie.

White Hill Studios released “Sardaar Ji 3” in select U.S. cinemas on June 27, 2025.

Review: ‘It Lives Inside’ (2023), starring Megan Suri, Mohana Krishnan, Neeru Bajwa, Betty Gabriel, Vik Sahay and Jenaya Ross

September 25, 2023

by Carla Hay

Megan Suri in “It Lives Inside” (Photo courtesy of Neon)

“It Lives Inside” (2023)

Directed by Bishal Dutta

Some language in Hindi with subtitles

Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed U.S. city, the horror film “It Lives Inside” has a cast of Indian and white characters (with one African American) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: A high school student, who has been shunning her former best friend, finds out that her friend has unleashed a supernatural evil monster.

Culture Audience: “It Lives Inside” will appeal primarily to people who want to see a horror movie with some jump scares and don’t mind if the rest of the story is weak.

Mohana Krishnan in “It Lives Inside” (Photo courtesy of Neon)

“It Lives Inside” had the potential to be a more intriguing horror movie if the plot had been developed better. There are too many unanswered questions by the end of film. Some stylish horror moments and adequate acting can’t overcome the movie’s flaws.

Written and directed by Bishal Dutta, “It Lives Inside” is his feature-film directorial debut. The movie had its world premiere at the 2023 SXSW Film & TV Festival, where it won the Midnighters Audience Award, given to movies that are usually in the horror genre or are considered movies that tend to be shown at midnight screenings. The movie has plenty of jump scares, but they don’t add up to much when the characters are so underdeveloped and the same types of scares get repeated.

“It Lives Inside” brings up issues of Indian immigrants living in the United States and navigating between Indian culture and American culture. However, the movie doesn’t really do much with this perspective, since “It Lives Inside” turns into a run-of-the-mill evil monster movie, where the monster just happens to come from Indian folklore. A lot of the Indian culture presented in the film is just style over substance.

Unfortunately, the trailer for “It Lives Inside” shows about 90% of the film’s plot, as well as reveals some of the best scenes in the movie, which takes place in an unnamed U.S. city. The plot of “It Lives Inside” is so basic, it would be enough for a short film. A lot of scenes could have been cut from the movie, and it wouldn’t have made a difference with the end result.

In “It Lives Inside,” a high school student named Samidha, nicknamed Sam (played by Megan Suri), is about 16 or 17 years old and living with her Indian immigrant parents: mother Poorna (played by Neeru Bajwa) and father Inesh (played by Vik Sahay), who are fairly traditional. Poorna is much stricter and more uptight than Inesh, who is laid-back in his personality and parenting style. An early scene in the movie shows Sam’s classmate Russ (played by Gage Marsh) inviting Sam to a party, but Sam says that she can’t go because her parents expect her to celebrate Magha Puja Day, which celebrates events in the life of Buddha.

Not much is ever told abut Sam during this entire movie. It’s mentioned that she failed her driver’s license test three times. She is also someone who has dropped her former best friend Tamira (played by Mohana Krishnan) because Sam wants to be in the popular students’ clique at the school. A teacher at the school named Joyce (played by Betty Gabriel) is concerned about the way that the other students talk about Tamira. When Joyce asks Sam why Sam’s friendship ended with Tamira, Sam doesn’t really give a completely truthful answer and vaguely says that they outgrew each other.

Tamira is immediately presented as a “weird” outcast. One day, Tamira shows up looking disheveled at the school while she is holding a mysterious jar. There also appears to be blood seeping from inside Tamira’s backpack. Tamira takes the jar with her everywhere. People at the school have noticed and are staying away from her or are making snide comments about Tamira behind her back.

Sam acts disgusted and doesn’t want anything to do with Tamira, who insists that something evil is living inside the jar, and this evil entity needs to eat raw meat. In the school’s gym locker room, Sam snaps at Tamira: “You’re such a fucking psycho!” Sam knocks the jar out of Tamira’s hand, the jar falls and breaks on the floor, and black dust comes out of the jar. There’s also an old book on the floor that Sam tries to give back to Tamira.

You know what all of this means in a horror movie like “It Lives Inside”: an evil spirit has now been unleashed. The monster’s name is The Pishach (played by Jenaya Ross), and it shows up in a lot of darkly lit scenes. What the monster does is entirely predictable, but don’t expect to hear anything substantial about the origins of this monster. “It Lives Inside” seems more enamored with how scenes look rather than telling a compelling story about the characters in those scenes.

Neon released “It Lives Inside” in U.S. cinemas on September 25, 2023.