Akshay Kumar in OMG 2. (courtesy: akshaykumar)

A video of a boy pleasuring himself within the faculty bathroom goes viral. He is rusticated for aberrant behaviour. He is gripped by self-loathing, his father is furious with him and their self-righteous neighbours sever all hyperlinks with the household.

The boy’s father, an dependable devotee of Lord Shiva, decides to go away the central Indian holy city they name dwelling. But earlier than the household can board the prepare that may take them to Saharanpur, an emissary of Lord Shiva exhibits up. The simple-minded man witnesses a miracle. He returns dwelling and opts to remain and combat.

Kanti Sharan Mudgal (Pankaj Tripathi) takes the college to court docket and calls for that his son’s unjustified rustication be revoked. By bringing issues out within the open, he hopes to assist the cowering boy rid himself of his sense of guilt and disgrace and compel the establishment to just accept the blame for not giving him and his classmates the steerage that they wanted.

The objective of Kanti’s petition – no lawyer is keen to symbolize him so he turns into his personal counsel – is to impress upon the court docket the necessity to introduce a complete intercourse training course in faculties in order that boys of his son’s ilk (and women, too) don’t fall prey to misconceptions about their our bodies and sexual needs.

That, in a nutshell, is what OMG 2, written and directed by Amit Rai (he made Road to Sangam 13 years in the past), is about. At one degree, the movie could also be deemed a pertinent courtroom drama that engages in a dialog of import. It, nevertheless, continuously ties itself up in knots and that is not a reasonably sight.

The overlong, convoluted and simplistic satire – the sprinkling of comedy strewn throughout it renders the train extra flippant than humorous – finally yields not more than a sloppy mish-mash of the related and the gratuitous that even essentially the most all-powerful of gods can’t salvage.

God’s messenger in OMG is embodied by a flamboyant Akshay Kumar. The star’s presence within the movie is comprehensible. It enhances the box-office potential of the enterprise. But why Kanti Sharan Mudgal would wish divine intervention to type out his and his son’s on a regular basis issues in the true world isn’t clearly and convincingly established.

It is sort of as if the makers had a story kernel in place and have been then given entry to the title of a commercially profitable movie from a decade in the past. God needed to be willy-nilly made part of the deal, regardless of how tangentially, for the movie to be known as OMG 2.

To return to the yarn, the exuberant godly mediator in a city whose reigning deity is Shiva is adopted by a colourfully draped bull – presumably a stay incarnation of Nandi – each time he exits a scene after having trotted out helpful maxims for the good thing about a confused believer. But the rockstar problem-solver appears to get pleasure from nothing greater than getting behind the wheel of a snazzy automotive and driving like a maniac. Traffic guidelines clearly don’t apply to him.

In a scene late within the movie, he performs one other life-saving miracle. The magical deed achieved, he takes Kanti for a spin in a quick automotive that leaves the latter dizzy with a mixture of alarm and pleasure. But not one of the exhilaration that he feels is transmitted to the viewers because the movie limps in the direction of a predictable climax.

In OMG, launched in 2012, an agnostic shopkeeper sues the Almighty when his curio retailer is destroyed in an earthquake, which his insurance coverage firm defines as “an act of God”. The movie, which had Akshay Kumar within the position of an avatar of Lord Krishna, revolved round a courtroom debate between religion and rationalism, between perception and scorn.

In the fully unrelated follow-up to that movie, there is no such thing as a room for the ability of the divine to be known as into query. Fervour replaces logic as God assumes a human type and descends on earth on a mission. He arms a harried father with the braveness, and ammunition, to tackle a robust faculty and a bunch of companies that give youngsters the false hope that there are quick-fixes accessible for his or her sexual deficiencies, actual or imagined.

OMG 2, which endorses blind religion even because it trots out arguments in favour of adopting a scientific, medical strategy to intercourse training in faculties, goes spherical in circles because it pits Kanti in opposition to Kamini Maheshwari (Yami Gautam Dhar), a lawyer who has a private stake within the final result of the case. She is the daughter-in-law (Yami Gautam Dhar) 0f the college chairman (Arun Govil).

The plea comes up for listening to within the court docket of Judge Purushottam Nagar (Pavan Raj Malhotra), an amiable man who’s all ears to Kanti’s tough and prepared arguments however has to continuously flip to the court docket stenographer for assist to decipher the plaintiff’s earthy lingo.

The movie is buoyed by vigorous performances that ring true, particularly those by Pankaj Tripathi and Geeta Agrawal, who performs Kanti’s befuddled and emotionally rattled spouse Indumati. But the intense spots go abegging as a result of OMG 2 is undermined by too many false steps that lead it astray.

The movie takes a random potshot at Macaulay, talks of how historical India was a mannequin of modernity whereas the remainder of the world was caught at midnight ages – no try is made to supply empirical proof to help this grand idea – and brings into the unduly fluffy narrative allusions to themes (akin to sexual violence, good contact and dangerous contact, et all) that ought to have been left for an additional movie.

If the makers of OMG 2 knew the place to attract the road and what to focus on and what to weed out, they’d have had a far mellower and infinitely extra convincing movie to indicate for his or her well-intentioned however ill-conceived efforts.

While a number of the ideas that the movie tosses round can’t be faulted, the strategies that it employs to verbalise them border on the overly callow, when they aren’t outright facetious.

So, what does one make of a film that desires to say the appropriate issues however doesn’t fairly know tips on how to say them? Should we commend it for simply attempting? If one have been in a beneficiant temper, the reply is perhaps is sure however not of the unequivocal variety that the affirmation would have been had OMG 2 not been such an exasperatingly middling affair.

To sum up, OMG 2 aspires to be as sharp as a scalpel however is definitely as blunt because the again of a knife.