What happens when Puneet Issar and a bunch of newcomers indulge in some Mahabharat nostalgia, shift it to the Sikh context, hark back a decade in time, and use dialogues from four decades ago? Well, apparently, I am Singh. The first few minutes focus on various angles of the Statue of Liberty, and then play all the videos from 9/11 that we saw on TV ten years ago. An old woman in a graveyard promises to tell us the story of how 9/11 messed up her life. We assume she lost her kids, or they became terrorists, and somehow we’ll end up in 2011. No.Auntyji, whose family some Ku Klux Klan type gang in biker costumes and action figure poses mistook for Arabs and attacked in 2001, wants to enlighten us about racism ten years later. These bald dudes, called ‘Racist Badmaashon’, are so stupid they try to make history by becoming the only people to illegally emigrate from America to Mexico. And yet it takes the FBI, SWAT and the LAPD to neutralise them.Now, the Singhs — well, that’s what everyone in the film is called, but nevermind - have a palatial house in Chandigarh, but two of the sons wanted to go to Amrika. They danced at bachelor parties, played cricket, made babies, and got beaten up. So, Auntyji and Bhabhiji call up Ranveer Singh (Gulzar Inder Chahal), who’s sleeping in Chandigarh, and he lands up in Amrika to get to the bottom of things.Ranveer, who pulls off the remarkable feat of being simultaneously wooden and twitchy, cries over Uncleji’s critical condition. Uncleji’s turban’s still on, despite his head injury, but is a different colour from the one he had in the flashback to the attack, so we know nursing care in Los Angeles is excellent. Then he meets rude cops. The cops have “illegally detained” Bhaiyya 2 for “possession of a deadly firearm”. Whaa, just because Bhaiyya 2 grabbed the gun Bhaiyya 1’s killers used?Bhaiyya 2 gets a black eye in prison for refusing to remove his turban, and so his son doesn’t want to wear a turban. *It’s all about the Turban - that’s even a song in the movie. Fateh Singh (Puneet Issar), who makes a throaty entry into the lives of the Singh parivaar, is a supercop who’s forced to resign because the Senate passed a “No Turban policy”. And when he finally wins, we’re treated to a three-way split screen of him striding along as It’s all about the Turban plays. And that’s not the worst part of the film. Daler Mehndi and Mika feature individually in two differentitem numbers, so I don’t know what the worst part of the film is.Okay, Ranveer wants to know kyun Uncleji and Bhaiyya 1 and Bhaiyya 2 were attacked. Enter Rizwan Haider, a Pakistani terrorist suspect, who painstakingly recounts the details of ‘revenge killings’ of several Sikhs and Muslims across the nation, by the Racist Badmaashon who can’t tell that Indian Sikhs and Pakistani Muslims are not Arabs or ‘Iranis’ or Iraqis. I mean, those guys are the real terrorists! The movie operates on the principle that Punjabis are not Arabs, and it’s repeated so often, it’s like flogging the ghost of a dead horse flogged twice over and hung out to dry.Sub-plots? LAPD’s in cahoots with Racist Badmaashon, the Singhs recount lessons from their gurus, and two hot lawyer-activists in knotted shirts hit on Ranveer and Fateh with so much come-hither-ness you half expect it to turn into a porn flick. There are repeated references to Gandhi, and to the armies of Guru Gobind Singh, complete with a poorly animated eagle. As a Sardarni friend mused, “This boy is confused. He’s going on about ahimsa and Guru Gobind Singh, who made us warriors, in the same breath.” Final verdict: This would only work as a primary school Annual Day play, ideally staged for a geriatric audience.
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