To be honest, given Wrong No. 2’s mood and tone, the questions don’t matter; it’s a screwball farce with clear-cut aspirations. The end-goal is to be as lighthearted and idiotic as possible, without rubbing anyone the wrong way.
Yasir Nawaz’s Wrong No. 2 is a mad rush. The plot constantly cartwheels from one ludicrous ‘Wrong No.’ to another, putting Mehboob dead-centre in a series of confusions.
Still, Wrong No. 2, has its own set of shortcomings. The situations Nawaz uses to peg the story’s emotions start and end with his character — and they are ridden with done-to-death clichés.
Mehboob has a sensible, good-hearted wife at home (Sana Fakhar), who never questions her husband’s whereabouts, or the ordeal he seems to be going through. Serious matters, such as curing Mehboob’s daughter or the villains’ introduction (Shafqat Cheema and Ahmed Hasan), are secondary concerns.
In fact, as in Chhalawa, the other Eid release, the villains are as irrelevant as the film’s leading man — who, you would have forgotten, is Sami Khan.
Unpredictably, Nawaz somehow manages to give every character their due spotlight — no matter how small that spotlight may be. Muneer, Fakhar, Danish Nawaz, even late inclusions such as Cheema and Hasan, are necessary and negligible at the same time. They come and go without disrupting the lighthearted flow of the film. And honestly, you don’t notice anyone but Javed Sheikh and Mehmood Aslam, so why bother.
The only character who doesn’t stand out is Mehboob, whose meek simplemindedness is directly proportional to the scope of Nawaz’s own on-screen performance. Unwisely, Nawaz dumbs down Mehboob to an astonishing degree, removing what could have been genuinely stirring moments in a comedy teeming with lunacy.
Now don’t get this wrong — Wrong No. 2 isn’t as madcap as JPNA 2. What it is, is Nawaz’s first, genuinely engaging, family movie. That’s a step up, if you ask me.
Published in Dawn, ICON, June 9th, 2019