Tera Yaar Hoon Main Review: Bas Kar, Yaar!

Debutant Aman Indra Kumar simply has no screen presence or charisma, sighs Mayur Sanap.

I have to admit I have this strange love-hate relationship with director Milap Zaveri’s films.

I love how his cinema has always been proudly ‘mass’. It is loud, unabashed, and completely convinced of itself. You can see the sheer joy of the man making these films, and for that, I am almost envious of Zaveri.

As or the hate part… it is pretty much everything else.

His latest film Tera Yaar Hoon Main, which borrows its title from the emotional track in Kartik Aaryan’s Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety, revolves around a love-hate relationship.

Boy loves girl. Girl’s father hates the relationship.

It’s a setup that reminded me of Bewakoofiyaan, which tackled a similar conflict with warmth, wit, and a delightfully charming trio of Rishi Kapoor, Ayushmann Khurrana and Sonam Kapoor.

This one introduces Aman, filmmaker Indra Kumar’s son, as its leading man. He plays a muscular jock whose biceps keep peeking out his tight T-shirts, while not a single facial muscle moves to help him in the performance.

The film is stretched to two-and-a-half hours that throw action, romance, comedy, drama and emotion at us, hoping something sticks. Sadly, nothing does.

Tera Yaar Hoon Main: The Plot

For reasons known only to the screenplay, the film begins in Nagpur, where Sanju (Aman) is a good-for-nothing youngster who occasionally rescues his friends’ doomed love stories. He is, as the film establishes early on, ‘yaaron ka yaar‘.

Sanju’s single mother (Mrinal Kulkarni) sends him to Mumbai in search of a job. What that job is, what he has studied, or what skills he possesses remains one of the film’s many unsolved mysteries.

He moves in with his mother’s best friend Vishu (Paresh Rawal), who insists Sanju stop seeing him as ‘old man’ and instead treat him like his…yaar. The title has to justify itself somehow.

Sanju moves in with Vishu’s family who lives with his wife (Supriya Pilgaonkar) and daughter Anu (Akanksha Sharma).

After the initial bickering, Sanju falls hopelessly in love with Anu, who remains unaware of his ektarfa pyaar.

Her father starts arranging her marriage elsewhere, and there begins the noble quest for the hero who decides to win over both the girl and her father.

Endurance Test, Not Entertainment

The first thing the film shows on Sanju’s bedside table is Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. For a gym bro, whose life seems to revolve around flexing, seeing a novel besides him instead of a protein shake comes as a surprise.

For a brief second, I wondered if Milap Zaveri was cleverly foreshadowing endurance or emotional resilience through that little visual cue.

Silly me.

The only endurance this film demands is from the audience.

Zaveri’s cinema often shows an outrageous conviction, and sometimes that absurd confidence becomes guilty pleasures in parts.

Tera Yaar Hoon Main doesn’t even have that luxury.

Conflicts appear and disappear. Characters behave according to convenience rather than personality. There is hardly any rhythm to the storytelling, as the film simply drags.

The entire conflict between Sanju and Vishu is so flimsy and juvenile, but it keeps behaving as if this premise deserves the emotional weight of Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam.

Hero Without The Heroism

Akanksha Sharma’S Anu exists largely to worship her father, delivering gems like, ‘A girl may find a prince, but her father is always her king’. She delivers the line with such sincerity that I almost erupted in laughter.

Supriya Pilgaonkar gets saddled with painfully outdated humour where she keeps butchering English words. ‘Broad-minded’ becomes ‘fraud-minded’. ‘Guest’ becomes ‘ghost’. ‘Bride’ becomes ‘pride’, only so she can later say, ‘Par tu toh meri pride hi hai na.’ Ugh!

Paresh Rawal does what he can, but there is only so much anyone can do with material this weak.

Johnny Lever turns up in an awkward cameo as a taxi driver whose cab endlessly blasts Gadar‘s Main Nikla Gaddi Leke.

Then comes Aman.

His debut performance is unintentionally comic even when the scene wants to be serious. He smiles when he should emote, and stares blankly when he should react. The lesser said about his emotional scenes the better.

The film desperately wants him to channel Kartik Aaryan’s playful tap-dancing in a party song, while also flaunting his ripped physique that every Milap Zaveri seems obligated to do. The problem is, the newbie simply has no screen presence or charisma to pull any of it off.

The outdated songs keeps barging in every few minutes with lyrics that sound like they belong in a nursery rhyme. Sample this: ‘Tanu ko Manu chahiye… mujhe Anu chahiye.’

By the time the film stumbles towards its haphazard finale, Sanju boards a Nagpur-bound train from Bandra Terminus. Bandra Terminus? The factual inaccuracy becomes the least of its problems at this point.

I looked around the nearly empty theatre. The five others still in their seats looked just as exhausted.

By the end, the only yaar you want by your side is the exit door.