Have you seen ABCD and ABCD 2? Faithfully consumed different types of dance reality shows ? Then why even bother with Street Dancer ? That too 3-D... Sigh. Remo D’Souza‘s latest offering as a director has Varun Dhawan and Shraddha Kapoor dancing it out in London . Both can’t stand each other and belong to warring teams. Sahej is an Indian and Inayat a Pakistani, and their meeting ground is Anna aka Prabhu Deva’s restaurant. From showing off their films based on their dance forms to indulging in donut fights, the eatery has seen it all.
For a film about dance, that too helmed by a well-known choreographer, Prabhu Deva’s inclusion seems only natural. Both Varun and Shraddha are known to wring their bodies into various enviable positions with grace. And this film also has some familiar faces who have wowed us in dance reality shows over the years like Dharmesh Yelande, Punit Pathak and Salman Yusuf Khan. Nora Fatehi, known to set fire to the stage, is a formidable presence. It’s another thing that she is completely sidelined and her track totally lost in the most absurd fashion.
The dance quotient is great even though there isn’t much that we haven’t seen or heard for that matter, considering it’s teeming with remixes. But some might argue that no one ever tires of watching Prabhudeva in ‘Muqqabla 2.0.’
Now the deal is, that for these individual dance forms to come together as a coherent whole we need some story, something to bind it together. And this is where the film develops two left feet. From flamboyant dialogues to melodrama we are spared nothing. The plight of illegal immigrants is introduced. A turbaned Aparshakti Khurrana appears with a bunch of starry-eyed desis for whom the London bubble has burst too soon. Led by Inayat, the dancers too soften as the film progresses. All this while the fierce battle for winning looms large. The prestigious dance competition is on. After a lot of dialogues and guilt-ridden heartbreaks things fall into place. The regular formula is employed here too. In one of the most insightful sequences in the film a character loudly exclaims “yeh kya ho raha hai?” This really hits - because for two-and-a-half hours this is exactly what we are trying to find out with the 3-D glasses perched on our noses .
We wake up in the last 20 minutes when the music reaches a crescendo and the dance routine has a lot of verve. But what’s the point? We have seen it all isnt it? And the way it unfolds here, we know well before the interval what’s going to happen. The biggest grouse though remains that they ignored Nora Fatehi completely.
Our rating: 1 quint out of five
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