Varun Dhawan’s ’Baby John’ vs Evil Jackie Shroff: Unexpected money lessons from this action-packed thriller

Keerthy Suresh, Wamiqa Gabbi, Sanya Malhotra, Sheeba Chaddha and the precocious child actor Zara Zyanna are all women in Satya Verma aka John’s life. There is a usual brigade of uglies who form the neverending gang of baddies in evil Nanaji’s life. Of course the current favourite villain of ‘South movies’ is Jackie Shroff. And he seems to relish each of these evil roles a bit too much. But does anyone care when we can have ear splitting sound that accompanies action that is so devoid of logic, you cannot but laugh hysterically when Varun Dhawan emerges from a bullet riddled shipping container riding a horse.

Never mind the horse, but no one knows why women in our movies fall in love with the ‘manly man’ who will be a cop, and then ask him to give up his job? Why do movies always have kids who talk so much you wish the villain’s gun had inadvertently killed the kid? Why do such movies rake in money week after week? What money lessons can such a ‘massy’ movie teach us?

Teach your kids the importance of saving and investing

Movie kids can be annoying, because writers toiling away in a writers room are trying to offer us ‘beats’ or tropes that the producers will like. In real life if your children were like Khushi from the movie, following their school teacher into a police station when you have instructed them to stay put in the car, especially when the teacher has not even noticed her there, then you would ensure that the child is grounded for life, isn’t it?

Children learn quickly, and you would do well if you teach them early the concept of money, the importance of saving and yes, investing too. Show them how you are investing for their future. Explain the relationship between risk and reward.

As they get older, teach them about stocks and bonds and help them invest their savings (yours, mostly!) and watch them grow with their portfolio. You’ll be pleasantly surprised how quickly children grow out of piggy bank savings and understand bank accounts.

No matter how shiny or glossy a mutual fund looks, learn to examine it

Look at the starry lineup of the film – from Keerthy Suresh, Sanya Malhotra to Wamiqa Gabbi, from Jackie Shroff to Prakash Belawadi, Zakir Hussain and Rajpal Yadav, the sharp trailer that promised to catapult the cute lovable Badrinath and Bhediya Varun Dhawan into an action star, the surprising entry of the one and only Bhai jaan, the supposedly ‘cute’ child who calls her father ‘baby’, action and dance numbers that is the mainstay of all ‘South’ films these days – everything that should add up to a wonderful film only makes you wish you had waited for it to show up on Amazon Prime eight weeks later. Running for 164 minutes, this film makes you wonder why no one thinks about details that matter.

For example, if you are a dedicated dad who rides a motorbike, would you not invest in a child’s helmet? If you are a cop with horrible enemies, living anonymously in a small town somewhere, would you not delete your social media footprint? How does Wamiqa find Varun’s identity so easily when the powerful bad guy who runs a human trafficking syndicate cannot? Too many plot holes to list here, but there’s a valuable money lesson to be learnt.

Just because some mutual fund looks glossy and is endorsed by celebrities or has a celebrity fund manager who has never once invested in something that has failed, does not mean you should blindly invest your hard earned money in this glamorous offering.

Find out all that you can about the fund, how it operates and who benefits from its losses as well as profits. It doesn’t matter who is showing you the shiny object, you can’t just turn into a lemming.

Varun Dhawan’s comic timing in Bhediya was so good, one wished this film too had utilised that innate quality of the actor. But when you want the shipping container filled with enraged girls to come down on top of the unrepentant villain and it doesn’t, you just step out of the theatre and drown hopes for cinema into yet another cup of black coffee.

Manisha Lakhe is a poet, film critic, traveller, founder of Caferati — an online writer’s forum, hosts Mumbai’s oldest open mic, and teaches advertising, films and communication. She can be reached on Twitter at @manishalakhe.