Revisiting Sanju, 2018’s worst film, before movie action begins this year

The first week of 2019 is awfully quiet with no significant Hindi film release. Sanjay starts the shot and merrily blows kisses at the photograph, the plan working till the magazine falls from the spotboy’s hand and he accidentally holds up a picture of Malini’s Sholay co-star, Gabbar Singh. There may be a laugh or two from the audience at Paresh Rawal’s exaggerated daddy bravado playing Dutt Sr, or at Kapoor’s simpering lips, but this scene is symptomatic of the entire film Sanju: it is a sloppily written, thoughtless film made of half-baked ideas. It is a film that holds media attention responsible for the fall of Sanjay Dutt, and a film that ends with a unforgivable song about how horrible the media is — a song where Dutt shows up alongside Ranbir to talk trash about newspapers — for paying attention to Dutt, an actor who may never have had a legacy if not for the many opportunities at failure he was afforded by a smitten Hindi cinema media. The director Ram Gopal Varma told me how he was stunned that his mother, who has watched the film twice, believes in its many falsehoods — including the singular and all-important Bestest Friend character played by Vicky Kaushal — because ‘how else would Raju Hirani show it on screen?’ That is the truly scary part.