‘Baby John’ review: A final subpar Hindi commercial film to end the year

A boy of maybe five or six stands over his dead parents. They’re in a row of bodies on the ground in front of a high-rise, construction workers who died because of low-quality netting. The builder at fault calls the boy over (he's from the northeast—migrant labour!), gives him 10 rupees and tells him to buy some chocolate. In the next scene, John (Varun Dhawan) crashes the builder's party, decimates his goons, and sends the man crashing through a window to his death. One of the onlookers is the young boy, who takes a triumphant bite of chocolate. 

This moment is pure Atlee: civic concern, grisly justice, contrived gesture to top it off. My distaste for his style grows with every film. There’s emotional excess but no emotional truth. Scenes are chopped into bite-sized pieces, whisked away before you can process them. The constant overtures of social reform are tedious. Suffering is cheapened by its quick transition into whistle-worthy moments. A young boy’s parents are dead, but the film only cares that viewers cheer when he eats chocolate gazing at a corpse. 

Atlee isn’t the director of Baby John, but the film has his imprint. He’s producer; the director, Kalees, is a former assistant; and it’s a Hindi remake of Atlee’s Tamil film Theri (2016), starring Vijay. John (Varun Dhawan) is a mild-mannered coffee shop owner living with his little girl, Khushi (Zara Zyanna), in Kerala. It’s clear right away he’s trying to stay under the radar, which becomes difficult when his car is used by Khushi’s schoolteacher Tara (Wamiqa Gabbi) to transport an escapee from a trafficking ring to the police station. Someone addresses him there as ‘Satya’. Not long after, men are sent to kill him, and he despatches them with practiced lethality. 

If you watched Citadel: Honey Bunny, there might be some déjà vu seeing Varun Dhawan so soon again as a killing machine who disappears after a tragedy and only resurfaces when his annoying daughter is in danger. Over two extended flashbacks, we learn that John used to be Mumbai DCP Satya Verma—a ‘supercop’, Indian cinema parlance for someone who carries out summary executions. Satya’s talent for putting away criminals places him, his doctor wife, Meera (Keerthy Suresh), and their infant daughter in the crosshairs of the powerful Nana (Jackie Shroff), a trafficker of young women and all-round loony. It’s a confusing and ungainly performance by Shroff, a Marathi-inflected, Tamil movie-coded Hindi villain whose signature move, for some reason, is throwing a leg over the arm of a chair.     

Baby John lasts 164 minutes, too long for a film this straightforward and lacking in smarts. Satya/John and Nana keep taking revenge by turn until it’s time for a final showdown. Dhawan and Suresh aren’t well-matched, and their courtship is as much a time-filler as Shah Rukh Khan and Nayanthara’s was in Atlee's Jawan (2023). Tara turns out to be some kind of undercover agent, a revelation that has zero bearing on the story. Dhawan is lightly likeable, as he tends to be, and disposable, as he also tends to be. 

Despite several capable heads in the stunts department (Anbariv, Sunil Rodrigues, Yannick Ben), the action isn’t where it should be. Dhawan gives a reasonable account of himself—Honey Bunny was a better showcase—but he hasn’t taken to the genre as well as his Student of the Year co-star Sidharth Malhotra. And Kalees doesn’t have Atlee’s skill for selling gimmicks. How can you have a movie star on a horse on top of a shipping container charging at assassins on bikes and not make it the coolest scene of the year?

Sumit Arora (The Family Man) is on dialogue duty, but Baby John never sounds like a natural Hindi film, even when the references are Hindi cinema (a scene from Deewaar is reenacted). Efforts to hype Dhawan like a Tamil or Telugu star—giving him his own title card, for instance—fell completely flat in my screening; Bollywood audiences today simply don’t have that ferocious connection with any star, with the possible exception of Shah Rukh. Hindi commercial cinema is floundering. Making bad imitation Tamil films won’t help.