Fat jokes, jokes on colour of skin, more fat jokes, sexist jokes, even more body shaming, misogynistic representation of women and not a single second of natural laughter. That is Raksha Bandhan in a nut shell.
Dead script
Raksha Bandhan has 99 problems and I am not counting Akshay Kumar. The story in itself is nothing special and even a modest runtime of 108 minutes feels like a drag. We are introduced to Lala Kedarnath, owner of a golgappa shop in Chandni chowk. The film opens with Akshay Kumar offering golgappa to pregnant women with promise of birthing male child if they have his golgappas. Right from the onset we get misogynistic and sexist jokes, and let alone being problematic, they are not even funny.
We soon learn that Akshay has four sisters and a next door girlfriend. He is trying to get his sisters married so that he can tie the knot with his girlfriend in peace. Both Akshay and his future father in law have running dialogues which present sisters and daughters as some kind of a burden. For next 1 hour and so, we get different shenanigans centered around Akshay’s quest.
Cringe dialogues
Along the way we get really classy dialogues such as “Sunny deol se Sunny Leone banana hoga” and a whole small skit revolving around making fun of two prospective grooms with speech impediments. We also get absurd plot points such as where Akshay Kumar easily sells his kidney for 50 lacs.
Rushed ending
Towards the fag end of the movie, it seems that the writers remembered to add in a social message along with a hurried final act. The whole message of dowry is bad gets completely lost. The whole arc where Akshay promises his already adult and probably out of college sisters that he will educate them well comes across as ludicrous and flat.
Acting
There is no acting in the movie.
Final word
Skip this movie altogether and wait for it to release on OTT platforms. As soon as it hits some OTT platform, make sure to cancel its subscription. Save yourself from yet another Akshay Kumar disaster and if you really want to watch a movie on dowry, go watch yeh aag kab bujhegi starring late Sunil Dutt.
