Review by Subhash K Jha: To beer or not to beer? That’s the frothy question in this eight-episode, cute-and-lathery series from Prime Video that doesn’t say as much about life, as it does about jugaadu entrepreneurship.
Tamannah Bhatia and the very beautiful Diana Penty paint the town red with their antics…or maybe antics is not the right word, considering there is very little over-the-topsy-turvy mood in the equation between the two ladies who want to make some money.
Nor harm that. But their modus operandi as scripted by Nandini Gupta, Aarsh Vora and Mithun Gongopadhyay, gets so progressively unbelievable, there comes a point in the never-disengaging series when I wondered if this genre of “everyone-is-a-potential-sucker” oversmart filmmaking should really be taken seriously.
Having gotten over that hurdle, Do You Wanna Partner is fun to watch. If not exactly a laugh riot, it does have its truly cherishable moments, most of them featuring the two leads who are to the chick flick what Jai and Veeru were to male bonding in Sholay.
Shikha and Anahita, that’s Bhatia and Penty don’t quite qualify as contenders in the Ms Sunshine contest. What I liked about the two ladies is their determination to stay on top of every situation, no matter how critical. They don’t seem particularly qualified to overcome their business hurdles. But they somehow manage to get along, thanks to their jugaadu personality.
Sooner than we expect, Anahita and Shikha are joined by a master of disguises (Jaaved Jaaferi) who masquerades as ‘David Jones’, the two ladies’ sponsor in their beer-manufacturing plans. Another accomplice Bobby (Nakuul Mehta) hangs round the two ladies with nothing to lose except his libido.
The characters in the series are never short of ideas. The writing keeps inventing new methods of keeping Anahita and Shikha’s business plans on the front foot.
I am not too sure the jugaadoo concept works in keeping the series afloat. What does work are the actors. Bhatia and Penty keep boosting the series’ fun prospects even when the writing fumbles at critical places, such as that entire slab of wink-wink-nudge-nudge ‘lover-in-the-bedroom’ antics when Anahita tries to hide her boyfriend from Shikha. Although why she needs to do that, is never clear to us.
The idea is to keep beer-ing with the shortcomings in the plot for the sake of the sassy entertainment that Tamannah and Diana hurl forward in this tale of two pretties hanging on to their last rupees, never considering what tomorrow may bring as long as today is a whammy.
The supporting cast, barring Javed Jaffery (who is fine when not questioning what he is doing) and Shweta Tiwari (as a dangerous enemy who likes to cut off men’s protruding body part, their thumbs), is hazy. How far would the writers go to keep the protagonists in deep focus? There is only one way to find out.
