Varun Dhawan and Sara Ali Khan in Coolie No. 1 (2020) | Pooja Entertainment/Amazon Prime Video
In
heaviest load carried by Varun Dhawan is the burden of legacy.
Dhawan’s latest project has been directed by his father, the 1990s hitmaker David Dhawan, and is a remake of the 1995 comedy of the same name. That film itself was a remake of the 1993 Tamil production
Chinna Mapillai, which in turn borrowed a major plot device from the 1970s classic
Gol Maal.
The first
Coolie No. 1 was written by Kader Khan, now deceased, and steered by the still-extant and evergreen Govinda. David Dhawan seems to believe that what Govinda did – and only Govinda could do – can be replicated by his son. This fatherly indulgence works very poorly for Varun Dhawan, who never quite comes into his own in a production aimed at resurrecting the ghosts of the past and recycling 1990s chartbusters and jokes.