Priyadarshan is identical with ha-ha-thons, but the talented narrator has been equally proficient while handling intense dramas like Saza-E-Kala Pani, Gardish and Virasat. Like Virasat and Malamaal Weekly, Billu, the accomplished director's new outing, is also set in a hamlet.

Billu (Irrfan Khan) finds it difficult to make ends meet by working as a barber. He doesn’t earn enough to pay his children’s school fees or ensure daily bread for the family. He has less clients and more cash-crisis.

Suddenly enters Sahir Khan (Shah Rukh Khan), a Bollywood superstar who shoots for item songs while his film’s script is still being haphazardly written. The script is supposedly futuristic in genre but Sahir strangely insists on shooting it in a village. The unit ends up in Billu’s backyards.

Word spreads that Billu and Sahir were early days friends following which the star-struck village lends liberal support to the poor barber. Everyone from the village moneylender (Om Puri) to the school principal (Rasika Joshi) wants to have a glimpse of Sahir Khan through Billu. But Billu is too shy to approach Sahir due to the vast difference in their social status.

Priyadarshan and Mushtaq Sheikh take credits for the screenplay, though ironically they only snip out scenes from the original Malayalam movie Katha Parayumpol. The retained portions are frame-to-frame replica of the original film with no freshness. But the storyline of the primary source in itself is one-dimensional all over and only stressed and stretched on the barber’s starry influence with no twists or turns at all.

One doesn’t expect the sensitivity of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi with the film-inside-film setting. But the story is neither intricately woven around the film industry like in the latest Luck By Chance nor is the format entertainingly exploited like in Shah Rukh’s own Om Shanti Om. All that the Bollywood backdrop does is make way for some surplus item numbers or formulaic action sequences, unconnected to the core plot.

There are those regular glitches galore – like the village belle Lara Dutta is always decked up with eyeliners and lip-gloss though there’s no food for the family. The scenes shot in Sahir’s film hardly need a village setting. It’s never explained how the villagers know of Billu and Sahir’s friendship when Billu never makes it public. And perhaps the term barber and hajam sound offensive only when sung, since they are muted in songs but oddly retained in dialogues. What’s the reason? You don’t ask that question in a Priyadarshan movie, even if it’s not his fault.

The director continues his brand of loud comedy though Manisha Korde’s symbolic dialogues come to rescue at some instances. Finally the movie attempts to reconcile its patchy plot with an emotionally driven climax but it only turns out to be an end of too much coincidence and handiness. However the conclusion could still work for all those who get touched by the likes of Shah Rukh’s emotive outburst in Mohabbatien. The friendship between Billu and Sahir is never established throughout the movie and only surfaces in the last scene. Some flashback account of their early days friendship could have helped. Sadly after all this, the film doesn’t even end on a moral tone, though it had ample scope for it.

Irrfan Khan is appropriately cast in the role of Billu and carries off his character naturally. But we have seen him play such roles so often that there remains no uniqueness in his act. Shah Rukh Khan has to just play himself, which brings no challenge to his character. The onscreen and offscreen mass hysteria of his Southern prototypes, like Rajnikanth in Kuselan, is so colossal that SRK comes nowhere close in making his character ‘hero’ic. Rajpal Yadav, Om Puri and Asrani are so common to Priyadarshan films that it becomes difficult to differentiate them from their previous works.

Overall, Billu is a sweet-n-simple movie that lingers in your memory even after the show has finished. The final 20 minutes are the best moment of the venture and that elevates the status of the movie to great heights. The movie has the potential to grow with a strong word of mouth. Recommended... Take your family for this one!