CAST: Jitendra Kumar, Jaaved Jaaferi, Arushi Sharma
DIRECTED BY:Sameer Saxena
Titled “Jaadugar” (translation: Magician) in Hindi, the film about a magician and his soccer-loving family is the latest from Netflix India. The movie is titled LOVE GOALS in the USA.
Meenu (Jitendra Kumar) is an amateur magician who is unlucky in love due to his inability to listen, and whose father was once a famed soccer player. His father’s greatest dream was to win the trophy for the local soccer tournament — a goal that his father’s brother has taken on by forming a ragtag team. The last piece of the puzzle is Meenu, who reluctantly joins. Elsewhere, Meenu falls in love with a local doctor and must win over her father in order to marry her.
The biggest problem with the movie is that it’s extremely difficult to figure out what exactly the story of the movie is.
After oscillating for almost three hours between romance, sports drama, coming of age film and slapstick, we just couldn’t point it to a genre or a story that we could create sense out of.
If they named it Love Goals, we thought, maybe it should be about the love story. But spoiler alert! There was none to be found. Atleast not one to write home about.
Was the story about a guy who didn’t think through things? Or about a magician who fell in love with his mentor’s daughter? Or his story of overcoming his own hatred of football or the choice between football and magic or the power of teamwork or WTF were the writers smoking.
All our love for Jitendra Kumar and then he turns up in this uninspired Meenu avatar which we just couldn’t root for.
A guy who is so self-obsessed that he refuses to listen to what the women in his life have to say. Frustrating yet he still makes it bearable. Meenu is really not good at even the things he says he is good at yet he presents his future with utmost grandiosity.
It was such a great effort to sit through this movie that we FFed most scenes and quickly jumped to our favorite K dramas where even the worst have more magic to offer than Meenu.
