Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Wild Wild Punjab’ on Netflix, A Slapstick Hindi-Language Road Trip Movie

Road trip movies have been around forever, whether it’s a buddy crime thriller like Thelma & Louise or a grounded drama about friendship like Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. Which route will Netflix’s Wild Wild Punjab take?

WILD WILD PUNJAB: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: After Khanna (Varun Sharma) discovers his girlfriend Vaishali has been cheating on him with their boss and is going to marry him in 2 days, his friends (Sunny Singh, Manjot Singh, and Jassie Gill) volunteer to go on a road trip with him to confront her (and crash the wedding). Along the way, they get into various hijinks, including Jain (Gill) accidentally getting married, the quad being arrested, and a shootout with drug lords.

What Will It Remind You Of?: A boys-only road trip to avenge a friend’s broken heart sounds like a spiritual successor to Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. But for how similar it is in themes, the two films are very different in execution: Wild Wild Punjab takes a noticeably more slapstick approach to the material to a quite different level of success.

Performance Worth Watching: Manjot Singh as Honey balances the out-of-the-box humor with actual emotion the best, even if his character isn’t given a ton to do.

Memorable Dialogue: Memorable mainly because it’s repeated endlessly in the movie, “I’m over you” is the cloying mantra that drives the film’s plot forward.

Sex and Skin: The film opens with car sex and the inciting incident of the film shows the silhouette of a woman going down on a man. So, it’s safe to say that this isn’t your grandma’s Hindi cinema.

Our Take: I’m a sucker for road trip hang out movies, and even more when there’s a central premise that demands character growth and evolution. Unfortunately, Wild Wild Punjab is not that film.

The problems are many, but let’s start with the central premise. Lovelorn Khanna is dumped—after being cheated on, which is one his few sympathetic character traits—but his reaction to the change in his relationship status spirals wildly out of control. At first he’s suicidal, a trope the film leans on way too much (another character also threatens to end his life with a gun to his head over his daughter’s sham marriage). Then, Khanna’s obsession takes him across Punjab to arrive at Vaishali’s wedding just so he can tell her that he is over her. (He’s not over her.) Beyond the character motivations, the film’s timeline doesn’t make sense if you think too hard—a wedding of this magnitude couldn’t come together over two days, and the film doesn’t explain that Khanna may have lived in his delusion for much longer than he had let on.

The “wild wild” journey that the characters take isn’t exactly new territory either. After a bender, one of them wakes up married and later, the trio are jailed from a run-in with the police. These are borrowed storylines from the likes of The Hangover and other boys trip drinking movies, and the new setting doesn’t make the spin feel new.

The two women in the film are extreme caricatures. Radha, Jain’s accidental new wife, gets turned on from a billboard about pantyliners while Meera is a drug-dealing baddie with a vape addiction. Radha in particular has little to do aside from being a nuisance to Jain and a damsel in distress for Honey to rescue. Vaishali, Khanna’s former girlfriend, is one-note and played as the “villain” without any redeeming qualities. Even worse, almost every character slips up and calls her “Veshya,” which means whore. Charming. For a film set in Punjabi about Punjabi people, even the male Sikh characters are portrayed as either buffoons or criminals (or both).

Unfortunately, I found very little to like about Wild Wild Punjab. There are ways to do comedy without reducing characters to stereotypes or reusing tired plots, but unfortunately the team behind the film opted against that.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Wild Wild Punjab doesn’t strive for character growth and instead settles on misogynistic portrayals and tired ideas.

Radhika Menon (@menonrad) is a TV-obsessed writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on Vulture, ELLE, Teen Vogue, and more. At any given moment, she can ruminate at length over Friday Night Lights, the University of Michigan, and the perfect slice of pizza. You may call her Rad.