Imagine… what if there was no music of the Beatles in this world. It is a good way of approaching an icon”s omnipresence in our universe. What if the plays of Shakespeare, the symphonies of Beethoven, the voice of Lata Mangeshkar or the performances of Meryl Streep were not with us? How drab life would be!
Not being a particularly fanatical follower of the Beatles” music, Danny Boyle”s steadfast outpouring of giggly gush got a tad tedious for me. To its credit, however, the film never plunges into pedestrianism . It preserves a perky optimism till the end. And none perkier than Joel Fry, who plays the Beatles-fixated protagonist”s sidekick. Fry is the sunshine of this sweet but drab aspirational saga.
The basic premise of the world losing memory of all the Beatles” songs during a 12-second global power outage is hard to accept. The heart is in the right place, but absurdities abound. What is a young brown Indian (or is he Pakistani) Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) doing singing rock and roll in London? It”s like a jazz singer from New Orleans singing on the roads of Patna. Who would take him seriously?