The easy criticism here is that the feel-goodness of such tropes does not have a place in today’s cynical world. Pedro is a typical Hirani hero: a misfit in the vein of rakish Munna Bhai, alien PK, student Rancho or wayward Sanju. The correct criticism is that the script will school everyone else to validate his cute-and-misunderstood antiquity. This means that someone — or something — will be blamed. Given the nature of the story, it’s ‘technology’ that takes the fall: a broad-strokes villain that brings to mind how the media is conveniently condemned for the protagonist’s issues in the Sanjay Dutt biopic. The overarching theme in Pritam and Pedro is that technology is baaaaaaad (in this precise knuckle-rapping tone). It’s naughty. It’s responsible for all that goes wrong: the missing boy, Pritam’s backstory, Pedro’s backstory (which spectacularly wastes Mona Singh in the familiar role of a grieving mother), a deranged hacker who shares a past with Pritam, a crook who threatens to leak intimate photos of his ex, a professor’s sex-tape going viral. Somehow it’s all related.
At one point, a scandalous picture is discredited on live news by placing it in the company of comically morphed photos of celebrities (basically, don’t believe what you see or hear anymore). At another point, a man is forgiven for being a psychopath because he’s a victim of a tech-triggered tragedy. I almost expected Pedro to use Gen-Z lingo like “Delulu is the only Solulu,” but the show does not cooperate. In contrast, Pritam’s track is designed to remind him of the humanity of the old days. The reason he crosses paths with Pedro is because he files an FIR when his old grandfather’s tape-recorder is stolen; the cassette inside had songs sung by his late grandmother. The older the device, the golden-er the emotions.
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