Name: Laal Singh Chaddha (2022)
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance
Released: 2022-11-11
Rating: 7.0
Cast: Aamir Khan, Kareena Kapoor Khan, Naga Chaitanya Akkineni, Mona Singh

Laal Singh Chaddha, starring Aamir Khan & Kareena Kapoor is a story set in India that unfolds through several historical events as a beautiful journey of love, adventure, hope and wonder.

Laal Singh Chaddha (2022)

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Laal Singh Chaddha verbalises Forrest Gump’s musings on life, love, morality and destiny. If the original conveyed things best in a soft, easy, unspoken way; this film turns up the tone and energy a bit. It opts for speech over silent tears so expect a perpetually wide-eyed Aamir Khan doing a lot of Punjabi accent with PK’s body language and enthusiasm. He sets the tempo of this film a bit higher, that of a big-ticket Hindi feature film but retains the essence of the original — a Disney like fairy-tale without the luxury of magic but an ingrained belief in miracles. Laal Singh Chaddha (LSC) localises the events but continues to stay in Forrest’s world.
Adapting a classic isn’t an easy territory to tread. Remaking Forrest Gump (FG) is even more complicated given its meandering, all-encompassing, nonlinear plot and profound yet simple approach to life and its purpose. You watch a simpleton wandering through life, not looking for answers but finding them along the way. He tells you his story as he embarks on a train journey from Pathankot to Chandigarh --his tough childhood, feisty mother (Mona Singh), childhood sweetheart Rupa (Kareena Kapoor Khan), accidental wealth, wars fought, friends made (Naga Chaitanya Akkineni as Bala and Manav Vij as Mohammed), facing death and running through the pain. We can’t say if the remake was necessary, but it was definitely a tough act to follow given how disarmingly poignant the original is and you know exactly how the events unfold in it.
Atul Kulkarni’s adapted screenplay, like its predecessor, merges facts and fiction. He aligns the fictional story to India’s socio-political and cultural context without playing it safe. ‘Majhab Malaria paida kar sakta hai’ (Religious radicalism can make people distant). He does more than swapping FG’s chocolates with gol-gappas. Be it the Ram Rath Yatra, Operation Blue Star, Emergency of 1975, the Kargil War, Bombay bomb blasts of 1993 that followed the Hindu-Muslim riots, a reformed enemy and more, Atul does his tough job well. Speaking of words, Amitabh Bhattacharya’s lyrics especially in the opening track ‘Kahani’ (sung in two versions by Mohan Kannan and Sonu Nigam) embody the spirit and nature of the film. ‘Zindagi hai jaise baarishon ka pani, aadhi bhar le tu aadhi beh jaane de. Hum Samundar ka ek katra hai, ya samandar hai hum?’ are words to live by.
Coming to the man of the moment, if you trace the trajectory of Aamir Khan's fascinating career, his film choices have mostly been driven by life nuggets and his unflinching political stance. Zindagi jeene ke do hi tarike hote hain...in Rang De Basanti or him likening life to pani puri in LSC — Zindagi golgappe ki tarah hoti hai. Pait bhale hi bhar jaaye, mann nahi bharata. Despite the boycott brigade, the actor speaks through his characters and advocates humanity over religion here. His drive to take on a celebrated role in his late 50’s, which Hanks played in his late 30’s is commendable. However, though evocative in portions and painstakingly done, he tries a bit too hard and the result is a tad extra. His constant pauses, de-aging and ‘hmmms’ feel more like an interruption. He seems too consumed with his own act to connect with others. You want him to drop the character excess a bit and keep it simple, something that Kareena manages to crack. She is beautifully restrained as Rupa aka Forrest’s Jenny. She displays shades of a sad Geet and wiser version of Madhur Bhandarkar’s Heroine, weaving it all together, hitting the right notes and striking a fine balance between involvement and detachment. Mona Singh exudes just the right amount of courage and compassion for her character. However, an actor who moves you the most is Manav Vij (remember Lieutenant Dan?). It’s he who gets the tone of Forrest Gump right.
Shot extensively across India, director Advait Chandan enters Rajkumar Hirani’s warm, funny and provocative satire space and succeeds partially. He creates a faithful but lengthy adaptation (2 hours 40 minutes) that makes a clever commentary on India’s political landscape. The film may not be as effortlessly moving or immersive as the original but it will make you want to see it with your family. At a time of evolving culture, LSC holds onto the good old values that make it worthy of a family outing. You will particularly remember a crackling Shah Rukh Khan cameo and heartwarming special appearance by Kamini Kaushal.

Aamir Khan's last great performance, some say, was Dangal. For me, it was Ghajini. It is ironic, therefore, that the actor, like the protagonist of the Memento remake, has forgotten what 'acting' is. And utterly heartbreaking. The method actor who made method acting common parlance now resorts to grunts and more grunts in his reinterpretation of Forrest Gump, a role synonymous with Tom Hanks from the film of the same name. The official Hindi adaptation of this Hollywood classic, Laal Singh Chaddha, much like that iconic buoying white feather, common in both films, floats but each time it lands at Aamir's shoes, is simply trampled upon.Unlike Forrest, we meet Laal on a train, on his way to meet Rupa (Kareena Kapoor Khan, Robin Wright's Jenny in the original). The camera pans up from his dirty shoes to his face and his twinkling eyes. A woman lugs her bag in and occupies the seat in front of him. Laal barely looks at her, and instead, digs into a box of golgappas he is carrying for Rupa. Paani alagse. And then he grunts. It is at that moment you know that the next almost three hours are going to be quite an effort.
For the most part, director Advait Chandan's Laal Singh Chaddha remains faithful to the original material. From the feather up top to Laal's 'magic shoes' as a child, jaadoo ke jute in this, to the metaphorical 'running' through the pages of history - a shoutout to writer Atul Kulkarni for that. I don't mind the fact that the box of chocolates is now replaced by golgappas - in fact, I'll say it adds quite the Indian tadka. Even though the change of philosophy here - from you never know what you might get to your heart will always want more - is itself an indication that we shall walk out wanting more.
But not all of Atul and Advait's creative liberties land. Mona Singh as Laal's mother, becomes a victim of a clumsy adaption. The zeal and confidence she instils in Forrest are defeated by the typical Maa funda in Laal Singh Chaddha - shielding her son from all the communal riots that ripped India apart in the 80s and 90s by teaching him 'desh mein malaria faila hua hai'. The makers do tie it up later with one of the most pragmatic lines in the film - dharam se malaria failta hai - but it came far too late, and we were bored.

Of all the Indianisation the plot goes through, Kareena's Rupa, adapted from Robin Wright's Jenny in the original, was perhaps the starkest. It was almost as if the makers knew Jenny, in her original form, wouldn't win the audience's sympathy. In order to make her more 'likeable', she was made 'vegetarian', so to speak. The madness of the 70s fueled by Flower Power we saw in Jenny is now reduced to an innocent woman being trapped in Dawood's Bollywood of the 90s. Interwoven with a tryst with physical abuse she witnessed being meted out to her mother as a child, it is not a bad trope. And Kareena, with her effortless performance, emerges looking better than Aamir, who, by the way, is still grunting.
Yes, so, all is ruined by Aamir's caricaturish acting. At what point during the making of Laal Singh Chaddha, one the actor himself admitted took him close to a decade and a half to make, did Aamir decide to reimagine a 'dimwit' Forrest as the 'borderline retarded' Laal, defeats me. The best way to understand how horribly wrong Aamir went with his over-the-top acting is to look at Naga Chaitanya's Bala, an Army recruit Laal befriends on the bus to the training camp. Aside from replacing the shrimping business with a chaddi-banyan ka business, Chay's Bala is as OTT as Mykelti Williamson's Bubba. He is a Tamilian with a typical 'South-Indian' accent the rest of India has always stereotyped it with. Yet, Chay lives it, and how! His sincerity and surrender to the material and director's vision show in every scene, which ensures his act doesn't tip over and look like a mockery.
Gary Sinise's Lieutenant Dan is entirely gobbled up and replaced with Manav Vij's Mohammad, a terrorist Laal rescued in Kargil simply out of the goodness of his heart, oblivious to the fact that he was the 'enemy'. Even as Mohammad follows Dan's trajectory through the rest of the film - co-founding Bala's chaddi-banyan ka business with Laal, and no points for guessing what they named the super-successful brand (ahem!) - the symbolism of establishing the enemy as the friend is far too stretched, and frankly implausible even in a suspended-disbelief state.
Laal is a boy from an affluent Sikh family living in Pathankot. And the fact that Laal Singh Chaddha's timeline ends abruptly in 2018, right before the Balakot Air Strike, says a lot about how scared this Chaddha is of the 'chaddis'.

The thing I liked most about Laal Singh Chaddha is Shah Rukh Khan. Go figure.

2022 was supposed to bring a ray of hope for all of us, after all the world has gone through more than two years of pandemic and things to get back to normalcy. But the proceedings unfolding around us doesn’t seem to have any positive effect.

At a time when humanity seems to be under the spell of fraudsters masquerading as bots and propagandists, especially with the threat of cancel culture and boycotting Bollywood without any reason, Aamir Khan’s Laal Singh Chaddha becomes a delightful and touching experience, a movie that deftly grapples with the pessimism of the world, but handled in a mature way.

Directed beautifully by Advait Chandan, Laal Singh Chaddha is clearly not a remake of 1994 Hollywood classic Forrest Gump, featuring Tom Hanks. While the makers have officially taken the rights from the original studios, this film is a mere adaptation of Eric Roth’s original storyboard, which easily blends into the India’s history, culture and tradition.
Writers in Indian cinema are often accused of being lazy of adapting a film internationally or even nationally by merely changing the settings and the cast. But actor-writer Atul Kulkarni is meticulous about finding not only the Indian version of each Forrest Gump beat but infusing it with the same charm. From a person’s name, to even a an individual’s religious identity and the various situations that people are in, everything is simply yet perfectly explained.

Just like Forrest Gump, Laal Singh Chaddha is not a heart-warming story about a mentally retarded man. Terming him as ‘alag’ from other children is too limiting for Laal. He never thought of himself as disadvantaged, and thanks to his supportive mother played superbly by Mona Singh, he leads anything but a restricted life. Watch him carefully and you will understand why some people are criticized for being “too clever by half." In fact, Laal, on most occasions, is more clever than any normal person.
With his ability to stay focused on one goal, Laal becomes an incredibly fast runner, first escaping bullies in grade school in a very beautiful scene where he loses his leg braces as the love of his life Rupa (played by Kareena Kapoor Khan) tells him, ‘Bhaag, Laal, bhaag!’ The scene makes you realise that Lal for the first time feels liberated from the crutches of the society.

From becoming the champion athlete in the college, to Laal’s loyalty to his best friend Balaraju Bodi aka Bala (Chaitanya Akkineni) from his army days, the character has a childlike innocence. Never one to break a promise, he follows up on Bala’s dream to start a ‘chaddi-banyan’ business. While recuperating from his wounds from the war, he becomes friends with the terrorist he saves which also leads him to receive a medal of honor. Later, Laal gathers quite a following when he runs across the country just because he feels like it.
And through it all, Laal cares most about his childhood love, the sweet but troubled Rupa. Laal’s unwavering love for Rupa who first reaches out to him when everyone else (in school) rejects him. Rupa, having a troubled childhood, turns herself into a self-destructive woman as he takes off on her own path. Laal, however, remains true to her over the years until she blesses him with the best gift of all.

Few actors have the innate likeability that Khan has so effortlessly projected. He plays Laal with just the right blend of sincerity and earnestness. He is predictably fantastic – he never stops being funny and strange, fleetingly giving us a peep into the core incidents that the country has gone through since 1971. The actor makes his character into a person so dignified, so straight-ahead.

Khan’s performance is a breathtaking balancing act between comedy and sadness, in a story rich in small laughs and quiet truths. It is never easy to admit when a movie brings one to tears, but you’ll be hard-pressed to hide yourselves when Khan’s face in one of the scenes looks directly into the camera almost making you feel the pain that he has gone through which is hidden behind his long beard and a broad smile.
Khan’s performance is elevated by Kareena’s performance. The actor offers yet another one of her many brilliant performances in creating a woman who is attracted not just to naive, simple man, but to the man beneath the simplicity. Mona Singh as Laal’s mother excels in every frame. A special mention for Naga Chaitanya and Manav Vij who find the nuances of their characters and take even the smallest scenes and bring them to life.

In the end, Laal Singh Chaddha is all about loving and also the longing for being loved. Its message of forgiveness and compassion can’t be better understood than in these fractured, times where narratives are being built on hatred rather than building a world of peace, harmony and togetherness.

In a dialogue, Laal says, ‘Meri mummy kehti thi ki ‘zindagi golgappe jaisi hondi hai, pet bhale hi bhar jaawe, man nahi bharta.’ I wasn’t satisfied with Laal and wanted to patiently hear his story. Laal Singh Chaddha leaves you with tears, smile and a reflective state of mind.

Laal Singh Chaddha Official Trailer | Aamir, Kareena, Mona, Chaitanya | Advait | In Cinemas 11th Aug

Aamir Khan is a celebrated Hindi film actor, producer, television host and director. He made his first screen appearance as a child artist in 1973 with the movie Yaadon Ki Baaraat. In his acting career spanning over three decades, he has appeared in over 50 movies. Aamir is best known for his performances in movies like Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak Dil, Sarfarosh, Raja Hindustani, Lagaan, Rang De Basanti, Ghajini, Dhoom 3, PK and Dangal. He made his directorial debut in 2007 with the movie Taare Zameen Par. Aamir has received nine Filmfare awards along with four National Film awards.

Aamir Khan

Kareena Kapoor Khan is an actress who made her debut with the 2000 war film Refugee. A recipient of several awards like the Filmfare, she is appreciated for her portrayal of a vast range of characters in multiple genres. Her performance as a riot victim in Dev and as a Shakespearean role in Omkara have earned her widespread critical acclaim. She is also a stage performer and co-author of self-help nutrition books. Khan has also launched her own clothing line in association with the retail chain Globus. She is the daughter of actors Randhir Kapoor and Babita and is married to actor Saif Ali Khan.

Kareena Kapoor Khan

Son of actor and entrepreneur Akkineni Nagarjuna, Naga Chaitanya Akkineni is a popular face in the Telugu film industry. He made his acting debut in 2009 with the movie Josh. Over the years, he became a rage in the Telugu audience and a social media sensation. He is best known for movies like Ye Maaya Chesave, Dhada, Bejawada, Premam, 100% Love, Rarandoi Veduka Chudham and Manam. Naga is married to actor Samantha Ruth Prabhu.

Naga Chaitanya Akkineni

Mona Singh is an actress and TV presenter who rose to fame with the soap opera Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahin. She went on to star in other popular shows and appeared in films like 3 Idiots, Utt Pataang and Zed Plus among others. Her work on TV has earned her several prestigious awards and accolades.

Mona Singh

A life-affirming story chronicling the extraordinary life of an ordinary man, ‘Laal Singh Chaddha,’ is a retelling of the Academy Award®-winning motion picture ‘Forrest Gump,’ through the lens of India’s modern history and culture. The film brings together Aamir Khan and Kareena Kapoor Khan to deliver audiences a story full of  heart, humour and optimism.

Laal Singh Chaddha (2022)(2022)