Wrong Number 2 In Review: The Right Kind of Eid Mix

In one of the last scenes of Wrong Number 2, a reformed Gul Nawaz (Javed Sheikh) seems to have genuine sympathy with her daughter Zoya (Neelum Munir). He tells us, forgetting your 1^st love isn’t easy but you have to look forward. It’s a simple scene based on story of the film, yet induced collective laughter in the cinema.

An earlier scene takes Mehboob Alam (Yasir Nawaz) to a brothel, while he is search of a specialist doctor for his ailing daughter. The word play here as one would expected is full of sexual innuendoes, even at the expense of the sick daughter. It is to put it plainly cringe worthy. Given that the film is trying to cater to a mass audience, one understands why the joke is there but still it is hard to digest.

Thankfully, writer and director Yasir Nawaz doesn’t overload the film with such jokes. Rather the film, in the 1^st half bonds with the audience. Yasir Nawaz is playing an honest government servant (by the looks of the office), who is struggling to find money for his daughter’s heart operation. Both Yasir and Sana Fakhar, playing the wife as Masooma give away all vanity. This is genuinely a couple who is struggling to make ends meet and have lost their individuality.

Gul Nawaz, is an industrialist and aspiring politician, while Mahmood Aslam as Ali Wazir is his long serving P.A/political advisor. Zoya, is free spirited and is in deeply in love with Ali Wazir’s son, Omer (Sami Khan). Gul Nawaz wants to marry Zoya to a political bigwig Choudhary sahab’s (Shafaqat Cheema) son, Happy (Hassan Ahmed) to attain the Petroleum Ministry in the next government. Zoya, afraid of her father’s anger, never reveals the name of her lover. Amidst all this confusion is Sexy Shaukat (Danish Nawaz) playing a crazy stalker of Zoya, who is rotting away in jail on orders of Gul Nawaz.

You get the premise of it. A bit like Houseful these characters all converge in the house of Gul Nawaz and all hell breaks lose. We have seen this story before. Audiences will relate to the hardships of Mehboob, who is moral human being but lack of health care system is making him question his own ethics. We see, a poor hating industrialist embracing his P.A.’s son.

When mixed with some witty dialogues and situations, excellent acting from the veteran duo Javed Sheikh and Mahmood Aslam, it makes for a fairly engaging film. Yasir Nawaz has played the role of a distressed father admirably. You feel his anguish. While, Sana Fakhar, Neelum Munir and Sami Khan are passable without being brilliant.  The music or dance sequences aren’t remarkable at times felt a bit forced.

With perhaps better editing and direction, the plot would have been much simpler. A certain few scenes seemed quite unnecessary placed just for laughter. It extends the film’s length especially in the 2^nd half. When we know the outcome of the film before even entering the cinema, it is perhaps better if the story reaches its conclusion in a relatively short amount of time.

It certainly isn’t a top of the line film. However, as we have seen with a lot of Pakistani romcoms, it is quite difficult to deliver a mass entertainer. Yasir Nawaz succeeds to a certain degree. There are certainly holes in the plot, which are to be ignored if you are going in for such a film. Some dialogues do play on stereotypes, but again there aren’t many of them. Rather than being a Grand Masti, the film is aiming to be Hera Pheri, which is much harder to do. It wouldn’t attain that cult status, but this isn’t simply sex jokes compilation.

Without a doubt it is an improvement on Yasir Nawaz’s 1^st two films. This is all one can ask for, incremental improvement.