Jagga Jasoos review: Tripping over fantasy

This musical-cum-caricaturish comedy is uncharacteristic of its actors, resulting in a drab fantasy

The labour in Anurag Basu’s labour of love, Jagga Jasoos, is evident. The fantasy drama works overtime to be delightful but ends up, like its awkward protagonists, mainly spluttering and falling over itself. 

At the core of Basu’s most elaborate work to date, is the relationship between an abandoned boy and his father figure. The emotional effect their story hopes to have is quickly eclipsed as the film devolves into a series of breathless tricks and stunts.   

Jagga (Ranbir Kapoor) is adopted and raised lovingly by Bagchi (Saswata Chatterjee), a bumbling intelligence agent. The latter disappears one day without explanation, after dropping the young child at a boarding school. He communicates once each year through fuzzy VHS tapes, in which he wishes Jagga a happy birthday, and shares paternal lessons such as how to shave or use a gun. 

The little boy masks a speech impediment by singing his words, so that the film plays out as a musical. Jagga has a Tin Tin hairstyle, and as it follows, he likes solving mysteries, too. He grows up uncovering local crimes in picturesque Manipur until embarking on the big personal mission of tracing Bagchi. 

Accompanying him is Katrina Kaif as Shruti Sengupta, a careless yet somehow competent journalist. The two are led by clues to the further-picturesque Kenya, which gives Basu and cinematographer Ravi Varman a chance to show us landscapes featuring many bendy giraffes, a couple of meerkats, and a cheetah.

There is no true adventure here. The thing with make-believe is it needs to make you believe. But Jagga Jasoos is too glib to be able to achieve that. The detective’s challenges rarely feel real, he wins regularly and easily. It is uncomplicated to the extent of seeming juvenile. Had the lead actors been less-known or at least 10 years younger, the antics might have been easier to buy into.

Not one of the film’s many chase sequences gets the adrenaline going. Their format usually involves a painstaking Rube Goldberg-style chain reaction, and this gets old faster than an iPhone model. To play along with this for two hours and 40 something minutes, a rare kind of wonder is required of the viewer. 

The film’s honey-coloured visuals are quite enchanting. Every character has a golden glow, as if bathed in Instagram’s “Rise” filter. The use of physical comedy remains, just as in Barfi, the previous Basu-Kapoor collaboration, which drew a lot from the Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin era. There appear to be hat-tips to world-cinema again — the sugary quaintness of Jean-Pierre Jeunet is glimpsed, as is the palette of Wes Anderson style, and surrealism of Michel Gondry.

When Jagga sings, the people around him, regardless of whether they stammer or not, sing too. At one point in a song, as if winking at the audience, a character tells him “Kitna tu gaata hai, kitna pakaata hai” (oh how much you sing, oh how you tire us). While the songs manage to be somewhat clever, the background score is characterised by the bells, boops, and chimes we have heard in so many Disney films.

Kapoor, who for some time has been scouting for a path-breaking role, does not find it here. He does get to showcase dancing skills and limberness, however, together with Kaif. The meatiest of the roles is that of Chatterjee, who is effective as Bagchi.

In the four years it took to make the film, the vision seems to have kept growing and what the creators of Jagga Jasoos fail to spy is it might have benefitted from a trim.