Hum Do Humare Do review: Well-intended, but poorly executed!

Hum Do Humare Do

Director: Abhishek Jain

Writers: Abhishek Jain, Prashant Jha

Cast: Rajkummar Rao, Kriti Sanon, Paresh Rawal, Ratna Pathak Shah

Streaming on: Disney+ Hotstar

A rags-to-riches orphan Dhruv (Rajkummar Rao) hires an old man and old woman to be his parents so that he can marry his lady love Anya (Kriti Sanon). The premise is interesting enough for Dinesh Vijan’s Maddock Films to put their might behind director Abhishek Jain’s film. The production house has brought a variety of quirky films on big screens which have created buzz and most of those have been thoroughly entertaining. But that is not the case for the well-intended but poorly executed Hum Do Humare Do.

It’s all broad strokes and Bollywoodization of the social message which the film wants to promote – it’s all about family. Desperate writing tries to serve this central theme of the film. Everything has to lead up to ‘family’, which because of its desperation lacks warmth and emotion. There’s no attempt to find nuance or detailing in characters or situations. The final draft of the scripts appears like the first draft where the writer is trying to figure out what the story is all about.

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The boy meets girl meet-cute lacks charm. The girl wants to marry a guy who has a nice family and a dog. She lost her parents in a movie theatre fire. He doesn’t even know who his parents are. The guy could simply tell that he doesn’t have a family. The girl can understand it if she loves him. Getting a dog is not a big deal. In fact, pets have become the new babies. Why I had a problem believing in it was because the guy is an entrepreneur who develops a virtual reality app. The girl is a popular blogger. Can’t they be sensible enough about things like family and a stupid dog?

Dhruv lies and tries to hire a father and mother for himself. Trips down the memory lane lead him to Purushottam (Paresh Rawal) who used to run a dhaba years ago and the young boy used to work there. Purushottam has a story of unrequited love with Dipti (Ratna Pathak Shah) who after Dhruv’s persistence agrees to become his fake mother. The two oldies reconciling their relationship and thinking of Dhruv as their own kid is a moving sentiment but the lackluster script makes it difficult to stay invested in characters or the story. Because of this basic flaw, nothing else really matters, performances, music, production design or editing. This could well have been another small-town film with Ayushmann Khurrana as the lead. His brother Aparshakti plays the hero’s best friend in this film.

The film takes a lot of time to set up the conflict between the characters which is necessary for the conflict of the story that the main conflict is wrapped up in the last few minutes of the film. I kept wondering whether people still want to have a family in today’s times when people are drifting away from each other so rapidly and for silliest reasons; whether the warm blanket of family can still keep the growingly stone cold people together.