After introducing three new stars in Student of the Year, producer-director Karan Johar is all set to give us two more stars with the movie’s sequel. Starring industry gal Ananya Pandey and outsider Tara Sutaria (so Kangana should be happy), the film also features Tiger Shroff, who is already a star in his own right.
However, this film is Kuch Kuch Hota Hai dropped down to ground level. No doubt, Tiger is a pleasure to behold as he jumps high, somersaults and flips through the trailer with high-octane gusto. However, the two debutante leading ladies can’t dream of matching strides with him. They don’t even try. Strutting around in brief skirts, they look like eye candy at their candiest. And simply can’t run because well, the high heels are too high!
While the first movie gave us at least one fine actor in Rishi Kapoor, who played the gay principal with a crush on the sports coach, the principal in the sequel, Sameer Soni looks more like wallpaper that has seen better days, more crushed than crush-worthy.
The love triangle (yawn!) has the two girls as possessive props, or so they seem in the trailer. Maybe they are more fleshed out and less skimpy in the film itself, especially since all kinds of miracles happen in the movies. While Student of the Year gave us the incandescent Alia Bhatt, every frame of the sequel looks too over-saturated with colour and laden with gaudiness to leave any room for even an iota of incandescence.
The campus of St Teresa’s brims over with exuberance, and faintly resembles Enid Blyton’s world spiced up with some sexy spectacle. This is a world of elitist education where students drive in to campus on Porsches and leave with two girlfriends for an evening of pleasure after receiving their education in the Karan Johar school of enlightenment.
Besides verifying the already-known fact that Tiger Shroff is the most agile star of today, Student of the Year 2 doesn’t have anything new to offer. Except of course, the clothes and the vehicles. The faces may have changed but the battles are still purely infantile. Bright but bland.
