Patna Shuklla Review: Raveena Tandon Starrer Makes For a Good Watch Despite Jolly LLB Flashbacks

Patna Shuklla Review: This weekend, Disney+Hotstar is streaming an interesting film titled Patna Shuklla. Directed by Vivek Budakoti and Rajendra Tiwari, the film skipped the theatres for an OTT release. It intelligently explores the horrific scam that destroys the lives and careers of underprivileged students and is headlined by Raveena Tandon.

Raveena Tandon plays the role of Tanvi Shukla, a lawyer in the Patna District Court who has been reduced to writing affidavits. Although Raveena headlines the film, Patna Shuklla revolves around Rinki Kumari. Played by Anushka Kaushik, Rinki is the daughter of an impoverished rickshaw puller. When her Bachelor’s examination results are declared, she finds herself on the failed list. She is certain that she should have scored over 60 percent. She had worked hard for it.

Patna Shuklla veers into the courtroom where a battle is fought between Tanvi Shukla (Raveena Tandon), a lawyer in the Patna District Court representing Rinki Kumari (Anushka Kaushik), the daughter of an impoverished rickshaw-puller, and the over-confident Neelkanth Mishra (Chandan Roy Sanyal), who is representing Vihar University, where Rinki had been a student.

Patna Shuklla strongly resembles Jolly LLB in which Boman Irani plays an arrogant lawyer defending a guilty young man, charged with running his car over men and women sleeping on the pavement. He was clearly drunk. Sanyal appears to be strongly inspired by Boman, and Raveena has traces that we noticed in the character, Jolly, which Arshad Warsi portrayed. The movie itself has many facets that run parallel to Jolly LLB. Judge Jha (late Satish Kaushik) in Patna Shuklla looks very similar to Judge Tripathi (Saurabh Shukla).

However, this is not to reduce Patna Shuklla to some kind of non-entity. It has its moments, and they are compelling. It is lovely to watch Raveena in a completely new avatar – as a lawyer pleading for a poor girl, whose life and future are at stake in the hands of a corrupt university administration surreptitiously exchanging the mark sheets of rich students, (with poor academic record) with those of academically brilliant young men and women who have no money power or political backing.

Patna Shuklla is undoubtedly one of the better films I have seen in recent months, but it sinks a little in my estimation because it tends to borrow a tad too much from Jolly LLB. But, examination scam is a huge business and the film arrives at a very appropriate time.