For Jaggi (Diljit Dosanjh), the ‘ji’ in ‘Sardaarji’ is an obligatory addition — whether that person is alive or dead. The lack of respect (probably twice in this movie) is the only time Jaggi gets angry in this otherwise fun, breezy, family film that makes up for its lack of story with a ton of cheesy, outmoded charm.
Jaggi, who rides around on a heavy-duty bike with a number plate that reads ‘Churrail Lover’ is a ghost-hunter, and he has a particular way of working: he exorcises male spirits, but the women — especially the beautiful ones — he collects. Yes, that sounds wrong and problematic, no matter how one looks at it!
In the second scene of the film (we’ll talk about the first later), he finds the ghost of a recently dead IT specialist (Jasmin Bajwa) at the cemetery. She died young, she tells Jaggi half-embarrassed, by mistakenly slitting her wrists after bullying her boyfriend to get her an iPhone. To ease her suffering, he asks her nicely to turn into smoke and get into a beaker he carries, so that he can take her away from the graveyard (carrying female ghosts in bottles is his thing, we learn).
This new ‘churrail’ (female spirits are called churrails here, though they are not witches), is happy to be a part of Jaggi’s harem; he has eleven others back home. The head of the undead girls is Pinky — or as he calls her, Pin-ki (Neeru Bajwa) — a bossy taskmaster who keeps the other churrails in check. Every churrail is in love with Jaggi, whom Pinki often offers to kill so that they can be together. Yes, the humour does get quite dark expectedly.
Jaggi’s business should be booming after his headline-making exploits in the first Sardaarji (the second film has nothing to do with that story’s continuation), so when the IT churrail (that’s what they call Jasmin Bajwa’s character in the film) offers to set up a social media profile, everyone is aghast to learn that someone (Noor) is already making a tonne of money using Jaggi’s name online.
Diljit Dosanjh might not be a great actor but he holds the frame just fine with his charisma in Sardaarji 3. The film prefers charm over acting and this Hania Aamir delivers in tonnes
Enter Noor (Hania Aamir), a smartly dressed ghost-seer like Jaggi, who captures spirits via a contraption that looks like a poor man’s proton pack and ghost-trapper from the Ghostbusters movies. Was it her design — she doesn’t look likea science whiz — or what her backstory is, we’ll never know … probably because other than a passing conversation in one scene, screenwriters Dheeraj and Manila Rattan didn’t think that part out.
Alas, that’s not the only thing they didn’t think about.
The opening scene of the film shows a heavily armed, S.W.A.T-like squad of gangsters enter a castle in the UK, knowing full well that it is haunted by a red-eyed, malevolent spirit that loves strangling people in mid-air, and they all perish in the process. The reason for it is unknown until the big reveal towards the end of the film.
To avoid failing like the earlier squad, later on in the film we see another group (Manav Vij, Sapna Pabbi, Pakistani comedian Nasir Chinyoti and Gulshan Grover as a late addition) — who we learn are also gangsters — hire Noor, mistaking her for Jaggi, to engage the evil entity.
By this time, Jaggi has already confronted Noor about stealing his identity… and, of course, the two have fallen in and out of love.
Jaggi also travels to the UK to face-off with the malevolent spirit… and just when you think the film has run out of steam and story (whatever meagre story there was), the film, unexpectedly, enters its intermission.
The rest of Sardaarji 3 is just as breezy — though one does notice that the second-half of the film is mostly set around a handful of sets and locations.
Diljit Dosanjh might not be a great actor but he holds the frame just fine with his charisma. The film, one gathers — as one gathers from most fluff Punjabi films of similar vein — prefers charm over acting. This Hania Aamir delivers in tonnes.
It becomes quite hard to look away from Hania in this film: the actress glows like an old-school film star. She lights up the screen (at times a tad too much in comparison to other performers), but doesn’t slouch in the acting department. Neeru Bajwa, in contrast, is merely fine, though she has a better character to work with.
Characterisation, though, is not the film’s strong point, and neither are its visual effects (they’re quite bad), or the songs by MixSingh (just okay). All of these elements — most less than stellar — actually work in favour of Sardaarji 3’s cheeky, cheesy, somewhat outdated approach to storytelling.
Given that the cinema hall was surprisingly full (I saw the film on a Tuesday evening, two weeks after its release, in Karachi — a city where Punjabi films don’t usually work that well). It seems like people, especially of our diaspora, prefer the old, simple ways of storytelling.
Directed by Amar Hundal and released by Wali Films, Sardaarji 3 is rated U, and is suitable for audiences of all ages, irrespective of whether they know the Punjabi language or not (those who cannot read English subtitles well might have a problem then)
Published in Dawn, ICON, July 13th, 2025
