“Love makes life live.” This is an absolutely awful tagline that means nothing. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s also clear up any confusion about Mohit Suri’s much-anticipated Aashiqui 2 being a sequel to the 1990 Rahul Roy-Anu Agarwal starrer, Aashiqui. It’s not. It is simply ‘inspired’ by it. Could they have called it something else? Sure. But then they could have done a lot of things to outdo their source of inspiration…and they didn’t.
Aashiqui 2 is the unnecessarily long story of a slowly-fading rock star, Rahul Jaykar, or RJ (Aditya Roy Kapur), who is losing his grip on life and tightening it around the necks of whisky bottles. As a result, no one wants to work with him and the once successful, award-winning singer and his career have crashed and burnt. Stumbling unconvincingly from bar to bar after a particularly dismal concert in Goa, he ends up at a beer bar where the in-house band’s singer Aarohi (Shraddha Kapoor) is singing one of his songs. It naturally follows that he falls in love with her and hears huge potential in her voice.
RJ convinces Aarohi to quit this gig immediately and go back with him to Mumbai, where he promises her a chance to sing for the movies and eventual stardom. (Because it’s that easy.) Sweet, wide-eyed, trusting Aarohi agrees. Enter dhoka, disappearance, heartbreak, rage. A couple of hiccups later, RJ finally makes good on his promise. Ignoring the need to revive his own career, he shifts his focus and new-found energy upon turning Aarohi into a star. Meanwhile, her new life mission seems to be to love RJ fiercely, come hell or high spirit. He succeeds in this, she succeeds in that, but our hero RJ is now starting to unravel.
Will he clean up his act and rise from the ashes of his self-destruction, or will he get further sucked into the black hole of his alcoholism and rage issues? What a heart-stopping conundrum it is not.
Considering the makers of this movie decided to retell a story we’ve already heard and seen before, the expectation is that there will be something new, something striking in the way they do it now, over a decade later. But there isn’t. From the overall storyline to the little details, like when Arohi’s poverty-stricken mother pawns off her mangalsutra for cash (come on, Mohit Suri), there’s nothing that makes it stand out. Not even the songs, unfortunately.
Speaking of which, I’m not sure why everyone’s been raving about the musical score of this film, because it’s been about two hours since I walked out of the theatre and all I can remember is one vague tune of what felt like a feature-film length background track. For a movie about music, wrapped in all the drama of an alcoholic rock star and his fast rising star of a protégé, this is a giant failing for Aashiqui 2.
As for the actors, Aditya Roy Kapur trumps his heroine, if only by a small margin—he’s earnest and instantly likeable, even though his performance is neither outstanding nor entirely consistent. In the scenes that demand emotional gravitas, he falters and you realise he still has a way to go. Then again, he is such a handsome fellow (with such lovely feet) that you find yourself forgiving him a whole lot. The same cannot be said of his leading lady Shraddha Kapoor. She’s pretty, sure, but it’s not enough to distract you from her frustratingly bland performance.
The script doesn’t help matters. Either I’m getting so awesome at guessing what every character in a movie is going to say next that I should stop reviewing movies and write screenplays instead, or Mohit Suri’s Aashiqui 2 is going to win the Golden Kela Award this year for most predictable dialogue.
So should you watch this or not? That depends. Do you really have 2.5 hours with absolutely nothing else to do?
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