He is a former police officer now living under an assumed identity, but a Wikipedia page as well as photos of him in uniform are readily available online. Soon after surviving a brutal attack, he sends off his beloved daughter to a school trip unprotected and unsupervised.
Baby John isn’t even trying. Kalees’s official Hindi remake of Atlee’s Tamil hit Theri (2016) rehashes its source material with as much enthusiasm as lead actor Varun Dhawan steps into the role of the rowdy cop.
Although Kalees is also credited with the screenplay, Baby John barely moves on the Vijay-starrer Theri, with whole scenes and stretches of dialogue regurgitated for a Hindi audience. Dhawan is John, a bakery owner in Alappuzha who’s bringing up his daughter Khushi (Zara Zyanna) all by himself. Is John doing a good job? Khushi’s bratty behaviour and heavily underlined precocity make you wonder.
John has been forced into hiding – or whatever he is calling it – after irking the gangster Nana (Jackie Shroff). Having made the mistake of letting Nana live, John has to resume his head-bashing ways – and the price is paid by viewers rather than John or any of the other characters.
Although John is the noble type, bleeding for children forced into beggary or girls trafficked for prostitution, the movie’s only message is one of extreme cynicism. Various helpless types with outstretched arms, weeping faces and bruised bodies are paraded about so that John may feel good about himself, and we applaud him for his bravado.
The cast includes Keerthy Suresh, Wamiqa Gabbi and Sheeba Chadha. Rajpal Yadav, as John’s sidekick Ram Sewak, gets to flex muscle too, because why not?
The 164-minute movie’s disinterest peaks when John dismantles Nana’s entire kingdom – in a single montage. Baby John follows the action thriller formula without even bothering to wait for the results. Unsuited to play an all-out action hero who can commandeer the film through unending nonsense, Varun Dhawan barely bothers, like Baby John itself.
