Rajveer Deol and Paloma Dhillon in a music from the film. (Courtesy: YouTube)

With nary an oz of freshness in its narrative elements, Dono is a watery broth that seeks to hold the Rajshri Productions legacy ahead whereas making an attempt to ship a contemporary love story about younger folks coping with heartbreak, the method of therapeutic and the act of discovering closure. It falls between two stools by no means to get again on its two wobbly toes.

Dono launches the careers of as many as three trade children – the 2 lead actors, Sunny Deol’s son Rajveer Deol and Poonam Dhillon’s daughter Paloma Dhillon, and the movie’s director, Sooraj Barjatya’s son Avnish Barjatya. They aren’t precisely out of their depths on this shallow affair however nor are they on a red-hot streak in a lukewarm movie.

The first-time director ensures that Dono is not low on glitz and gloss – that, after all, is simple to attain – and the 2 younger leads, working throughout the limitations of a scrappy screenplay (Barjatya and Manu Sharma) that’s caught between two eras of Hindi cinema, do all that they will to brighten up proceedings. But nothing they bring about to the desk is sufficient to assist the movie snap out of its unevenness.

Dono by no means breaks free from outdated habits emphatically sufficient to have the ability to soar. It is fairly to have a look at all proper however tough to digest. A dreary narrative, unimaginative writing, uninspired performances and a shallow plot that by no means springs to life offset all of the pulchritude of the folks and locations that the movie seeks to get some buy from.

Rajveer Deol is Dev Saraf, who runs a floundering start-up in Bengaluru. Paloma Dhillon is Meghna Doshi, who has simply damaged up from her boyfriend of six years. The woman Dev silently loves, Alina Jaisingh (Kanikka Kapur), is getting married to Nikhil Kothari (Rohan Khurana). Dev is emotionally down within the dumps.

It is on the large fats vacation spot marriage ceremony in Thailand – an infinite sequence of rituals that stretch the movie to an unconscionable two and a half hours as the 2 households, their pals and the in-and-out-of-love children (serving as clotheshorses for colour-coordinated lehengas, ghagras and saafas) plunge into the merriments of the second – that Dev and Meghna meet.

This is all tantamount to a half-hearted revival of Hum Aapke Hain Koun, the 1994 Sooraj Barjatya movie that set the template for all marriage ceremony dramas to come back. Dono is delivered in a brand new bottle that can’t cover the truth that it is not actually new.

Dono just about follows the identical HAHK playbook however aspires to be thought to be a up to date movie with its sensibilities rooted in a combination modernity and custom through which the latter outweighs the previous. But this consciously chaste concoction by no means strays too removed from Rajshri territory as a result of the hangover of previous successes is rarely simple to shake off.

Dev is a reluctant visitor at Alina’s marriage ceremony. He has been invited by the bride, a woman he has had a crush on ever since he can bear in mind however has been unable to inform her that he loves her. He seeks closure. Meghna is a pal of the bridegroom, whose greatest pal Gaurav Shah (Aditya Nanda), is her ex. She is right here to point out the man she has dumped that she has moved on.

Once the stage is ready – nothing within the movie is sharply delineated and the dramatis personae hem and haw their manner via all of the problems that observe – the rigmarole begins. Love blossoms between Dev and Meghna however the path ahead is unsure for the twosome. Meghna’s ex tries to woo her again. He apologises to her for being the jerk that he’s.

It all will get messier when the dulhan begins to have second ideas about exchanging nuptial vows. About midway via the movie, three potentialities open up: Meghna may return to Gaurav, Dev may lastly profess his like to Alina or Dev and Meghna (whose affair does doesn’t get into full swing till the movie is able to wind down) may determine to let their love obtain fruition.

Dono is a narrative of wealthy children groomed to be respectful to their elders. Even in searching for freedom for themselves, they don’t seem to be a defiant lot. The movie permits them a drink or two, a tentative kiss and a point of enjoyable however they don’t seem to be the categories to stray from the slender alleyways of their sanskari upbringing. Their households name the photographs.

Rajveer Deol and Paloma Dhillon aren’t wanting enthusiasm, however the two younger actors have some method to go earlier than they are often thought to be completed articles. They do present flashes that recommend that they’re on the way in which. Individually and in stray scenes, they do exude youthful attraction. But there is not a lot chemistry between the 2.

Dono has a big forged of actors who crowd the frames with out leaping out at us. That permits Deol and Dhillon to hog the limelight though they, too, should jostle for house in a movie that’s too lengthy and too uninteresting for anyone to take a seat up and take discover.

Some of the etchings that Dono does could also be new. The canvas is not. It is a cinematic heirloom that Avnish Barjatya treats with nice warning. No surprise Dono, irrespective of how assertive the younger folks it’s about are, performs out alongside anticipated strains. It affords nothing that might be construed as a clear break from the previous.

It is manner too antiseptic to be the fashionable movie that it desires to be. In what’s presupposed to be a love story with a number of layers, overlook the layers, even the story goes lacking. It is a trudge via miles of inanity that labours to steer us that that is what present-day relationships are – or not less than, must be.

It could also be true that every one the world loves a lover however the two in Dono are destined to be exceptions as a result of they’re in a movie that is aware of not the place it’s going.