OMG 2 Movie Cast & Crew
Wikipedia calls Amit Rai's OMG 2 a "spiritual" sequel to Umesh Shukla's Oh My God – and a lot of the spirituality comes from the film being set in Ujjain, home to the Mahakaleshwar temple. Pankaj Tripathi plays Kanti Sharan Mudgal, a staunch devotee of Lord Shiva in this temple town filled with Naga sadhus and picturesque celebrations of Mahashivratri that seem to have been shot by the National Geographic. The story, too, has to do with one aspect of Shiva – that is, the form in which he is worshipped. Kanti's son is caught masturbating in school, and when the threat of expulsion arises, Kanti takes on the education system in court. His mission (and the film's mission) is to say that sex education is necessary. Could this story have been told without invoking a major God? Yes. But when you make a sequel, you perhaps have to stick to some of the things that made the first movie work.
Early on, Kanti's daughter explains the concept of phone charging this way: "male cord, female slot." The younger generation is not shying away from sex talk. But still, this is a small town, and when news about the masturbation incident goes public, it gets embarrassing for the family. OMG 2 addresses a number of issues: teens worrying about penis size, quacks peddling "make it bigger" medicines, the guilt associated with masturbation, the reluctance of even Biology teachers to talk about sex, the fact that Indians used to be far cooler about sex until the British came in and made everything a taboo act… Yami Gautam plays the prosecuting lawyer as though echoing those archaic British attitudes. The first few times she approaches a witness, she is shot like the shark in Jaws nearing a hapless swimmer. So the film is basically an extended and simplistic PSA, with Akshay Kumar as one of Shiva's minions. He speaks in abstractions that help Kanti in the courtroom.
OMG 2 is way too long, and some plot points (like the one involving a big bribe, or the depressed teenage boy at the epicentre of this mess) are not fleshed out very well. But the reason the film is sit-through-able is the cast. Pankaj Tripathi is excellent as always. He's doing broad shtick, but even there, he finds nuances that keep Kanti from becoming a caricature. And the local Hindi dialect helps a lot. It makes everything sound new. The other great performance comes from the great (and criminally under-utilised) Pavan Malhotra. He plays the judge, and he also plays comedy. I can't seem to recall this actor in a comic role before, and he is brilliant. His puzzled asides with the court stenographer bring the house down. And a special nod to Brijendra Kala, whose sewing-machine joke is howlarious. I wish the proceedings had been less predictable, but this satire is impossible to dislike.
