Munna Michael movie review: Tiger’s dance moves and punches are failed by poor logic

Directed By: Sabbir Khan
Produced By: Viki Rajani, Sunil Lulla
Cast: Tiger Shroff, Nidhhi Agerwal, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Ronit Roy
Duration: 2 hours 20 minutes
Bollywood Bubble Rating: 2/5

“I don’t really care about the padding around me. It’s the script and my character that matter,” said Tiger Shroff in one of his interviews, when he was asked about working with fresh actresses. Half an hour into ‘Munna Michael’, and you understand it is all about exalting his ambitions, ornamenting his journey from an abandoned newborn to a dancing star and glorifying his selflessness.

Sabbir Khan begins his story with Michael (Ronit Roy), a dancer in the 90s who eventually runs out of his charm as he ages, and is thrown out of the business. One rainy night, he happens to rescue Munna (Tiger Shroff) and the kid becomes the bane of his life. While Michael doesn’t want his son to undergo the same humiliation like he did, Munna eats, sleeps and breathes dance. Amid inescapable circumstances, Munna is forced to leave Mumbai, but he never gives up on his dream. In due course of time, he meets Mahinder (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), a hotelier (and an interestingly emotional gunda) from Delhi who pleads Munna to teach him dance. Meanwhile enters starlet Nidhhi Agerwal aka Dolly, a woman stuck at a Delhi hotel as a dancer but aims to be a dancing star one day. With her killer moves and mesmerising looks, Dolly has successfully captured Mahinder’s heart. But how to impress her back?

There begins the story. We initially are quite intrigued at the multi-angular equation that’s cooking up. But in no time. It turns insipid.

This one is a routine Tiger Shroff film, with fight sequences, songs and dance in regular interludes. While Tiger dances like a reverie and even masters high-octane action sequences, the commercially challenged audience wouldn’t churn out much from this film. Tiger (who frequently boasts, ‘Munna jhagda nahi karta, Munna sirf peetta hai) himself does more and acts less. But then, with him in a film, filmmakers seldom looked for a heavily impactful story. In fact, what hurts is how they make desperate attempts to fetch traits from other characters to glorify the protagonist.

Nidhhi Agerwal, the Bengaluru girl who defeated a several hundreds to get through the film, is a pleasure to look at and sways prettily. But thanks to ‘Munna Michael’ paying all its heed to Tiger and his dilemma, Nidhhi ends up being just an additional character. Dolly is a woman who runs away from her home to chase her dreams, ends up being a dancer in a hotel, is lured by expensive gifts and flats and falls in love at a wrong time. If only treated with apt gravity, hers could be a major takeaway from the film. Nawazuddin Siddiqui acts his best, although isn’t just convincing enough as the unfeeling land mafia. We, however, never thought he would shake a leg with swag, and it was an absolute delight. The one who truly makes a mark in a brief role and few dialogues is Pankaj Tripathi. This time, not at all taken aback by Ronit Roy.

Further, the film makes way for numerous unresolved questions and takes some absurd cinematic liberty to connect the dots. Dancing through hours with a bullet inside your thigh or making prank calls to an airline to delay a flight are not tricks that the audience of 2017 would happily buy! We can’t mark it above average in terms of production values. The story is woven amid workable cinematography and average music.

Sabbir Khan is evidently not willing to shift his genre and hence, comfortably sticks to mediocre intelligence with ‘Munna Michael’. This one would definitely tap fans of Tiger Shroff and even the ones into dance. But for the rest, it might just turn you off!

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