Film: Tum Bin 2
Dir: Anubhav Sinha
Cast: Neha Sharma, Aashim Gulati, Aditya Seal
Rating: **1/2
What's it about:
Amar (Gulati) loves Taran (Sharma). The two go off on a skiing trip. He gets into an accident and is presumed dead when several search parties come up empty-handed.
Taran mopes and mopes and feels his presence everywhere. Family tries to console her, but to no avail.
That is until Shekhar (Seal) shows up. A breath of fresh air, he convinces her to find happiness any way she can.
He helps her open a patisserie. He helps a friend out by convincing her sister about okaying her Pakistani boyfriend.
All-around good guy, no clear past except supposedly being a family friend.
And Shekhar falls for Taran. Slowly but surely.
And she does too. That is until Amar returns.
What's hot:
The cinematography for sure. It's an immaculately shot film. Everybody is filthy rich in this movie and the landscape makes you want to move to wherever in the UK this is. Aditya Seal comes off as the best of the newcomers. He's got a charm and niceness about him that's rare these days.
Shekhar's gay friends are not treated as caricatures, thankfully.
What's not:
It's almost the same movie as Tum Bin. Just better packaged. Same spiel. Not spoiling it for you, but if you've watched the first film, you get my drift. There are cosmetic changes in the script, with a little borrowing from a certain Raj-Rajendra film. As a musical, it works too well, just that nobody paid to watch a string of music videos. You're never clear about who's related to who. If Amar has two sisters and his father, why do the three live separately and why do they behave like Taran's roommates? If the sisters are not related to Kanwaljeet (he plays Amar's dad) and only to Taran, that would still make sense. But if that's the case, why is Manpreet closest to him. It's all very weirdly ambiguous.
Also, the female characters in the film are the same number as the male characters. While this is a good thing, they'd fail the Bechdel scale miserably. All they do is talk about their love lives.
What to do: The first half kinda builds you up while the meandering second half brings you down with its inordinate length. Closure comes a little too late. A shorter runtime and fewer songs might have made this a better experience. But still not as good as the first film.
