Dunki: Shah Rukh Khan Does His Best to Rescue Hirani’s Silly, Preachy Film

Rajkumar Hirani’s Dunki is an uneven, meandering, confused film that wants us to be emotionally invested in the distress and hopelessness of people who are forced to take the illegal route in search of a better life, while the film keeps its hero above and aloof from the desperation to leave India.

The film has many issues, but its fundamental problem is its lumpy script. Like those old, winter razais, in a few places, it is nicely stuffed, wooly, and warm, but next to it are big patches that are threadbare and limp.

The film is a patchwork of cartoon characters, silly skits whose jokes don’t land, and intense, emotional moments that are cut short by preachy, screechy bhashans about the right to migrate. 

Dunki keeps flitting between treating the issue of illegal migration and the desperation of men and women as real and as a joke, not letting us forge any connection with their situation or them.

Shah Rukh Khan does his best to elevate Dunki with his performance and charm, at times lighting up the screen with his acting and at times using vintage moments from DDLJ to make us connect with his character.

In Dunki, Khan looks like he is on a rescue mission trying to hold it all together, but the film lets him down again and again as it keeps lapsing into slapstick mode or grabs the microphone to deliver a lecture.

Dunki is set in Laltu, a village in Punjab, and in London, and its story is about the journey its characters undertake to get from one to the other.

The film opens in a London hospital where an old Indian lady is a patient and a white man is mopping the floor. 

This scene gives us a glimpse of Hirani and scriptwriter Abhijat Joshi’s cinematic chutzpah and their ability to use our mundane, lived reality to tell their story with poignancy without saying a single word. Sadly, there aren’t many such scenes in the film.

Dunki introduces us to Manu (Taapsee Pannu), who drives a black cab in London, Buggu (Vikram Kochhar) who works at a restaurant, and Balli (Anil Grover) who runs a tailoring shop, and then it introduces an idea that should have been the crux of its story but isn’t—the desperation of Indians who migrated illegally, sought political asylum and now, in their old age, want to visit their families but are met with the hubris of a nation-state that denies them visa. 

To find a solution, Manu & Co. call up their coach-mentor-guide-margdarshak Hardayal Singh Dhillon and Urf Hardy (Shah Rukh Khan), and they all decide to meet halfway in Dubai.

Flashback to 1995 in Laltu, when they were all young and were looking for a way out of Punjab to England.

In their village and into their lives arrived Hardy, a Fauji who just wanted to settle an old karz but stayed on with the promise that till they were all settled in England, he wouldn’t leave.

There are visits to touts who promise student, spouse, and sports visas but turn out to be frauds. Their desperation is real, but it gets a comical treatment.

Earlier, in Munna Bhai M.B.B.S and 3 Idiots, when Hirani and Joshi served reality with a sprinkling of comedy, there was alchemy, and the end result was irony. Now it feels inappropriate and jarring. As if they are ridiculing their characters, their desperate situations, and their desire to migrate.

Next, there’s the English-speaking class of Geetu Gulati (Boman Irani) who repeatedly says “Burming-ham, here I come,” followed by a series of skits on how to ace the IELTS test.

This is also mostly cringe-worthy except for Sukhi (Vicky Kaushal), who is a living, breathing human being among caricatures.

As Sukhi waits to go to England to rescue the woman he loves, he wails against NRI tidde (locusts) who take away the girls they love.

Only Kaushal is able to save his character from turning into a cartoon because of his acting prowess. He fills up Sukhi’s story with emotions and forges a connection with us. But just as the film feels like it’s beginning to settle down, it’s interval time.

When it resumes, Dunki sets off on the ‘donkey route’. The journey begins with some VFX nonsense, is followed by a stunning sequence, and we get a taste of what it means to spend several days locked up in freight containers, hiding under cars and inside mattresses. Again, the film begins to coalesce into a story that has some emotional depth and heft, only to scatter again as it rushes into a slapstick skit and then to deliver a lecture on human’s right to migrate.

Dunki’s story is framed rather simplistically within the history of the colonizer nation taking Indians to work in the UK after World War II, to now when it is selling citizenship for a million pounds.

The film tick-marks several political issues, including the 1984 riots, the overuse of the national anthem, the unshakeable bond between Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis who find comfort in each other’s company in videsh, and an apathetic state that won’t allow some Indians living abroad to visit their loved ones.

Apart from the fact that the film offers pitiful logic as it challenges visa rules and boundaries, its argument against a country that is denying its erstwhile citizens visas doesn’t work because Hardy himself thinks seeking political asylum tarnishes desh ki izzat.

Dunki was supposed to be this exciting collaboration between two men who were at the top of their game until they faced the wrath of right-wing trolls. 

For Khan, who made his comeback this year with superhit action films such as Jawan and Pathaan, Dunki was to be another feather in his cap, along with Swades and Chak De.

For Hirani, who returns to the screens after being accused of sexual harassment by a woman, this was his return to good graces.

One delivers, while the other fails.

Hirani’s film, which he has co-written with Joshi and Kanika Dhillon, can’t decide what it is or how it wants to tell its story.

Its tone flits between being sanctimonious and facetious, almost as if it has an attention deficit disorder and can’t stay with any one thing for too long. Thus, characters too oscillate between being real and cartoons, and we oscillate between wanting the story to give us something to connect with and giving up all hope.

There’s a long list of things that don’t work in Dunki and are jarring, like the Punjabi accent of many of its actors.

Shah Rukh Khan’s “Oye! Kiddan” is cute, but his hoarse voice seems to suggest that all Punjabis grow up in mud akhadas wearing little red chaddies and drinking lassi as they slap their oiled dole-shole and thighs.

Yet he’s the one who seems to know that the film needs rescuing and tries his best.  

Taapsee Pannu and Khan have no chemistry, but he is able to create moments of love and longing on his own. And without much help from the writers and the director, he gives Dunki some lovely scenes that we can and will watch over and over.

Taapsee Pannu is not a great actress, but sometimes she gets the essence of the character she’s playing and delivers a memorable performance, like in Thappad. In Dunki, however, there’s a cursory, casual tone to how she plays Manu who never grows into a three-dimensional character. 

Vikram Kochhar was excellent as Buggu, but Boman Irani was ridiculous. In his English-speaking class, Vicky Kaushal felt like a veteran actor amid first-year acting students.

Watch Dunki for Kaushal and Khan.