“If I win and then lose, I’ll only remember the loss. If I lose and then win, the victory remains in history. Because history only remembers how you finished. I don’t know how will history remember me. How will you remember me?”
This is the closing quote of the 2024 movie Lucky Bhaskar, starring Dulquer Salmaan as the titular protagonist, a struggling bank employee who embezzles his way into a fabulous life of wealth. Now, history is too vast a subject, but for an almost 3-hour-long film, it’s easy to remember how it begins, no matter how smart its ending might be. And for the first full hour, director and writer Venky Atluri (Vaathi/Rang De) fumbles at establishing Bhaskar as a likable protagonist.
Bhaskar is shown to be a hardworking, middle-class bank employee, knee-deep in debt because he is the sole breadwinner in a family consisting of an ailing father, two younger siblings who are college students, a homemaker wife (Meenaakshi Chaudhary), and a school-going child. But the year is 1989, Bhaskar lives in Mumbai in a house of his own, and he rides a scooter to work—two big luxuries for the time, and certainly not “borderline poverty” like Bhaskar claims at the beginning of the tale. I mean, c’mon! He doesn’t have to pay rent in Mumbai and has a bank job! The house is so big, one entire family could live in his hall and pay him rent. It seems more like a classic case of financial mismanagement.
Not sure why nobody else in Bhaskar’s family is chipping in. The college-going siblings could tutor kids in the evenings, and his educated wife, who harps on about wanting to start a home-food business, never actually gets a job to help out. Add to that, Bhaskar pins all his hopes on a promotion, and when that doesn’t happen, he picks a fight with his senior at work, only to immediately shut up when the senior points out that Bhaskar has a side hustle, which is illegal. Most of this is established in the very first ten minutes, by the way. Venky Atluri tries to paint Bhaskar as a pity-worthy, middle-class man pushed by hardships into a life of bank fraud to make quick cash. Why not just show him as he is—an opportunistic wolf in sheep’s clothing, living beyond his means?
At the beginning of Lucky Bhaskar, there’s a disclaimer that says, “Although the entire story takes place in Mumbai, all the characters speak in Telugu for the convenience of the Telugu audience.” They should’ve just added, “P.S. We don’t know much about Mumbai. He He.” The entire movie rests on Dulquer Salmaan’s shoulders, so the entertainment value of the film depends on how onboard you are with Bhaskar’s backstory of financial woes. I patiently slogged through the entire film to see if Bhaskar faces the music for his misdemeanors at some point. No such luck.
The second half of Lucky Bhaskar tries to pull a Wolf of Wall Street, with Bhaskar becoming a millionaire through market manipulation of stocks. Things do get interesting for about 30–40 minutes in between. As he keeps getting richer and greedier, he faces some minor setbacks in his personal life and conveniently learns a tough lesson through someone else’s misery. This could’ve been a highly entertaining movie if only director Venky Atluri had taken the risk to show his protagonist as a more aggressively morally gray character, instead of throwing in sentimental scenes to make viewers feel bad for him. Like a scene where Bhaskar and his family walk out of a birthday party because his sister-in-law begrudges his son an extra piece of cake, telling the kid, “This is enough for your face” (lol, wut?).
How will we remember Bhaskar? As the guy who had his cake and ate it too. Watch the film if you’re a Dulquer Salman fan.
Rating: 2 stars on 5. “Lucky Bhaskar” is on Netflix.
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