Movie: Jadoo: Kings of Curry
Director: Amit Gupta
Cast: Tom Mison, Amara Karan, Harish Patel, Kulvinder Ghir
Rating: ***
This Anglo-Asian comedy, which tickles your funny bones at regular intervals, couldn’t entertain on the whole due to the lack of strong actors who could do justice to a promising story. While the film addresses cross-regional modern-day relationships openly, not much weightage is given to the same in the story to root for the attempt in the first place. Nevertheless, “Jadoo: Kings of Curry” has a few reasons that can instantly make you fall in love with it. One such reason is that it celebrates Indian food like no recent Indian as well as foreign film did.
Two brothers – Raja Chandana and Jaggi Chandana – extremely good chefs have a fall out and part ways to become rivals in the food business. They rip their family recipe book in half and proceed to lock horns by setting up separate restaurants across the road from each other in Leicester’s famous Golden Mile. But there’s one small problem. When the family recipe book is ripped in half, Raja gets the half that has recipes only for starters while Jaggi’s half has recopies for main course. Both of them can’t cook any new recipe because all their lives they’ve only known to cook their family recipes and are champions at it.
Meanwhile, Shalini (daughter of Raja) visits her father for Holi and informs him that she’s planning to get married to an Englishman named Mark. Much to her surprise, Raja agrees instantly because nothing is more important to him than his daughter’s happiness. As her wedding gift, Shalini wants both her father and uncle to cook together. Will Shalini’s wedding reunite the Chandana brothers who haven’t spoken to each other in over a decade? This forms the rest of the story.
There are moments where you tend to have a soft spot for the film. For instance, when Raja welcomes his future son-in-law with arms wide open, you wonder what has gotten into him. This is suitably backed by a scene where Raja explains to one of his employee that his late wife had told him many years ago that they can’t expect their children to be like them. The cross-regional relationship is pushed with sincerity, respect and contemporary attitude. But the story doesn’t give as much importance to this relationship as much as it gives to the rivalry between the brothers.
Too much time is wasted on the rivalry between the brothers and when we’re finally revealed why they split in the first place, one is not completely convinced with the reason. The climatic confrontation scene, which was supposed to be the most important scene of the film between the two brothers, lacks soul due to the wooden performances of Harish and Ghir. What was supposed to be an emotional moment becomes lifeless.
Indian food plays one of the central characters. This is probably the second film after “Lunchbox” to have given so much of importance to food from the story’s perspective. Due to this, more care and attention is given to the food than the characters. The dishes on display look gorgeous and serve as a great promotion for an Indian meal once the film is over. Sadly, we don’t get to see the big wedding cooking we are initially promised.
This review was originally written here