Jodi Breakers: Promising premise, insipid execution

Jodi Breakers
Director: Ashwini Chaudhary
Cast: R Madhavan, Bipasha Basu, Milind Soman, Dipannita Sharma Atwal, Helen

Coming off a marriage made in hell, divorce expert Siddharth (R Madhavan) bumps into a pretty woman, Sonali (Bipasha Basu), in a friend’s watering hole and mistakes her for a client. The lady believes in fairy tales and happy endings.

Unlike poles attract. Sonali ends up becoming Sid’s business partner and packs her bags for Greece on a mission to trap a high-flying businessman who is cheating on his wife. It becomes quite obvious rather early where this convoluted film is headed. Yes, it’s Greek all the way.

Dysfunctional couples grappling with marital dead-ends are great news for the wily male protagonist of Jodi Breakers. He preys on their susceptibilities and makes a living off their sore hearts and devious intentions.

Intriguing as that might be as a central premise, the film’s plot is a jumble of such ill-considered flights of narrative whimsy that it rarely passes muster. The concept is promising in parts, but the execution is almost always utterly enervated.          

Jodi Breakers is an excruciatingly strenuous romantic comedy that has neither romance nor comic energy to compensate for the lack of vitality. It strives hard to be funny, resorting to gross ribaldry and scatological gags to boost the flagging humour quotient, but fluffs its lines more often than not.

As for the romantic aspect of the oft-abused genre, the film offers one inordinately long-winded and fluffy prelude to a lip-lock between the hero and his girl – the sequence, split into two, rambles on far too long for its own good. Just get on with it, folks!

Returning to our man Sid, his business is to engineer messy break-ups so that the men in the muddle do not have to cough up alimony to their ex-wives. No blow is too low for his all-out hatchet jobs.

The screenplay sets the stage in the most ludicrously contrived manner possible. Sid catches a young two-timing wife in a white negligee, hides himself in a closet, and gets the ageing husband of the woman to burst upon the scene without warning.

A minute later, the latter lies dead on the bed, an apparent victim of a heart attack. It turns out that it’s only a sting operation that Sid has stage-managed. The girl’s avarice is exposed: she has eyes only for the old man’s riches.

With the wife morally discredited, the hubby gets the right to dump her without having to pay her any maintenance. Game’s on. The make-and-break man for all seasons is here to yank hearts apart!

For all its flaws, the first half of Jodi Breakers does have some passable moments, thanks largely to the efforts of Maddy, Bips, Omi Vaidya (once again cast as a heavily accented Hindi speaker) and a few stray punch-lines that land on target.

Despite being stuck in the 3 Idiots groove, Vaidya is able to raise a few laughs, especially in the sequence in which he dons the garb of sex guru Baba Kamdev as part of a deal to help out champion boxer Gajendra Singh, who has lost his sting in the ring due to the never-ending carnal demands of an oversexed wife.

In the second half, Jodi Breakers goes downhill. No speed-breakers are in sight; none is needed. The film turns soporific and silly as the lead pair sets out to repair a relationship that they scuttled solely because Sid wanted to shake his hard-to-stop ex off his back.

The duo goes from Greece to Goa to get wealthy entrepreneur Marc Pereira (Milind Soman) and the now-pregnant Maggie (Dipannita Sharma Atwal) to drop their divorce plans under the watchful eyes of a doting granny played by Helen.

The estranged couple is taken to the church where they had wed each other many summers ago. They are reminded of their marriage vows. Along the way, the film sinks into absurdity as attempts are made to pun on the lady’s name – Sid talks of two-minute noodles as the panacea of all ills. If that sounds inane, wait until the film’s climax.

It makes a clean break from logic as all ends well: hearts are quickly mended, the evil home-breaker beats a hasty retreat, and the two serial love terminators eventually find solace in each other’s arms. Your place or mine, the hero asks. Your place, says the lady. The audience is left stranded!