Happy Journey
Happy Journey is a failed attempt of director Sachin Kundalkar to tell a story differently.
The movie could have been a lot better, if the director had not corrupted it too much with his hunger of creating differently funny, witty-yet-likable, layered characters.
This is the story of a brother(Niranjan) and a sister (Janaki) who have not known each other closely, because the brother is made to go away to Dubai to earn money, very soon after arrival of his sister. Although they don't know much about each other, they still love and care about each other in their own way. When Janaki dies young due to an incurable disease, she comes back to haunt and change her brother to teach him to live life to its fullest while it matters.
The story is worth making the movie, not because there are no good looking, loveable ghost movies made before, where ghost teaches value of life to human, but because....
No, even the story is not new!
So, having said that, if you are making a movie on a kind of old, predictable story, then the direction, characters, dialogues should be at par. They should make audience overlook the story.
This is where Sachin Kundalkar fails and gets carried away. The director here tries too hard to go out of the box and bring unrealistic characters to life. Not only the movie is full of flaws, it also is full of patch works where it looks like the story is forced to follow only the happy path.
Why Janaki always stays in the van? why Niranjan's parents never catch him in the van where he is spending time with his sister? How convincing it is that Nirajan's love (Alice, played by Kritika Deo and Pallavi Subhash) since childhood is also unmarried even after being older than 35 years, just because her father is a gangster?
The unanswered questions keep on piling up even before you reach half of the movie and then onwards you just give up thinking. You just realise that you have to enjoy the movie because it has 'Happy' in its name. The director tries to comment upon family issues, society issues, love issues etc. etc. in his own way, but you never get entertained. Don't go for this self proclaiming happy ride!
