Ludo review: Screwball comedy starring Abhishek Bachchan is deliciously energetic

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Discard: Abhishek Bachchan, Aditya Roy Kapur, Sanya Malhotra, Fatima Sana Shaikh, Rajkummar Rao, Rohit Saraf, Pearle Maaney, Pankaj Tripathi

Director: Anurag Basu

Evaluation: 3 stars (out of 5)

It’s easy to compare life to just about anything, especially when it comes to sports. So, ludo is a fair game. He can’t throw curved balls at you, but he’s very risky. Largely motivated by luck, it reflects, in its sheer chance, the vagaries of human existence. Anurag Basu’s Ludo, a Netflix original film, takes the analogy all the way to the home stretch – and a bit beyond – to deliver a on-the-fly action comedy that’s as deliciously energetic as it is luscious.

Basu, who is also the director of photography and production designer for the film, in addition to playing a key role onscreen as Sutradhar in a way, injects a picaresque, fable quality and a lot of wacky humor into his Ludo, an awkward vision of love, loss and letting go that reflects the dynamics of fate in the extremely fluctuating lives of the characters who populate four diverse and intersecting stories.

Guy comes across an old sex clip that could jeopardize his ex-girlfriend’s long-awaited destination marriage. A criminal leaves prison after a six-year sentence only to find that his wife and daughter are no longer his. Another man, a little crook who becamedhaba owner, pins for the now married woman he has loved since he can remember. And a small town boy is courting trouble when he gets away with an unclaimed suitcase and a Malayali nurse.

The first spotlight is on the four men who have nothing to do with each other. Their paths lead willy-nilly to a gangster who rules the city from a vast lair by the river that lurks hidden in plain sight. He kills a builder, his wife and her lover, setting off a chain of events over which the arrogant dude himself has no control. The others have no idea. They are simply sucked into the vortex.

Each of them, including the Invincible Mafia Don, a character straight out of a comic book considering how he survives falls and death-defying jumps, has a willing female to fight, which makes the infinitely more dizzying rigmarole and much more. More fun.

Like any game worth its salt, Ludo takes a while to heat up as the pieces are placed in front of us, one after the other, then in a confusing crisscross heap. Information overload needs to be addressed before you can even begin to understand what exactly is going on. But isn’t this how life is in its unpredictability?

Basu’s script captures the imponderables of the concepts of paap and punya (sin and virtue) and desire and destiny to perfection, using deliciously divergent paths to grasp the tortuous nature of love and its myriad complications.

Once the movie hits his straps, there’s no stopping him until he gets home. The characters are sent in pursuit of a wild goose through unspecified places in search of things their hearts hope for but their minds cannot fully grasp. Consider the grinning assassin Satyendra Tripathi aka Sattu Bhaiya (Pankaj Tripathi), who takes the bit of sweetness with the terribly rough without losing his ability to look at the brighter side of life.

When he kills his first victim at close range, he lets her know he thinks he’s doing her a favor. He says he gives the man on the verge of death the chance to make a “fresh start” in an imaginary afterlife. Alok Kumar Gupta aka Aalu (Rajkummar Rao), who waits for tables in his own restaurant and monkeys Mithun Chakraborty, is no less offbeat. Having lost the love of his life, he goes to great lengths to help Pinky (Fatima Sana Shaikh) free her husband, who is in prison for a crime he did not commit. Aalu admits he will never be able to say no to the lady. He jumps headlong into the mission and lifts his stomach several times but clings to his altruism.

Now on to the sex tape. Ventriloquist Akash Chauhan (Aditya Roy Kapur) is alarmed when he unexpectedly surfaces despite his own face not being visible in the pictures. But her partner in the act, Shruti Choksi (Sanya Malhotra), is clearly identifiable. The clip goes viral and threatens to derail the girl’s upcoming marriage to a wealthy incense stick entrepreneur. Akash and Shruti take action to have the video removed.

The only strand of Ludo who is a little weak on mirth is one in which a serious like hell Batukeshwar Tiwari (Abhishek Bachchan), Bittu to the world, fights to assert his right to the daughter he fathered with his wife Asha (Asha Negi ) before ending up in prison.

Also in the frame is a poor rich little girl Mini (Inayat Verma), neglected by her parents and stolen from a pet, her only true friend. A plan, fueled by childish daring and an episode of the TV show CID, propels the child into Bittu’s orbit. Together, they hatch another plan to make a quick buck and force her neglectful parents to mend their ways.

There in the jumble is the blameless boy Rahul Awasthi (Rohit Saraf) who is dragged into the ‘epicenter’ of the crime led by Sattu Bhaiya. He finds himself on the fire with a big booty and a brave nurse Sheeja (Pearle Maaney), who doesn’t speak a word of Hindi, causing a few stinging situations.

Ludo uses a Hindi film song composed by C. Ramchandra almost seven decades ago – “Ô betaji, kismat ki hawa kabhi naram kabhi garam“(Albela, 1951), where Bhagwan Dada wears a white toque and exudes a pop philosophy – as a musical refrain. The betajis and babujis to which the song refers are the quintet of Ludo whose dice rolls rarely provide the numbers they need to stay the course. The women in their lives – including the little Mini – are much more lucid. That they didn’t get any mention in the song out of the womb of time doesn’t matter. The suggestion is that they are able to shape their own destiny.

With Pankaj Tripathi and Rajkummar Rao pulling their weight unabated and Abhishek Bachchan doing an excellent job of fleshing out a brooding misfit seeking redemption amid the chaos, the performances stay true to the spirit of the film. Rohit Saraf as the unpretentious and always at sea Rahul and Aditya Roy Kapur as a voice artist who often needs more than his art to get him out of trouble, keep up with the game.

The girls – Fatima Sana Shaikh, Sanya Malhotra, Pearle Maaney, Shalini Vatsa (as the head nurse who develops a bond with Sattu Bhaiya) and the young Inayat Verma, who are all in their elements all the time – add l breadth, depth and color to the field.

One of the male characters of Ludo confesses to his friends: “Kuch rishton mein logic nahi hota, sirf magic hota hai.“Absolutely! Think about Ludo like a ride with more magic than logic and you will likely find some, if not all, of your love. Give the game a chance.