I had high expectations, especially after Vidya Balan herself talked it up to me in May and Dia Mirza was buzzing about it in front of me in April, and it’s obvious that Bobby Jasoos is high on many
production values, most notably characters and their development.
What it’s low on: cohesion and continuity. For real.
It starts off with wonderful premise, 30-year-old Bilkis
(Bilkis!) “Bobby” wants to be a detective in Hyderabad’s old city, but nobody
will give her a job or even the time of day. (Unless you count TV news hunk
Tassawur [Ali Fazal], who pays her regularly to foil his dad’s attempts at
marrying him off.) And her family is certainly less than understanding as well,
worrying about marrying her off or at least reining her in enough to get her
sister married off.
But then it devolves into continuity errors, seriously
uneven pacing and desperate attempts to wind all of the threads together. (Case
in point: Mysteriously Threatening Bad Guy A, a gangster in love with Bobby’s
childhood friend [whose name is not even consistent] whom Bobby sort of
blackmails, turns out to be the son of Mysteriously Threatening Bad Guy B, who
is paying Bobby to find girls in the city who then quietly disappear.)
