New Delhi:
‘Rock On 2’, the sequel to ‘Rock On’ weaves a magic on the strength of its beautiful music and amazing story.
Farhan Akhtar (Aditya Shroff) has left music and pursues cooperative farming in Meghalaya.
Joe (Arjun Rampal) works as a reality show judge along with being the owner of a club.
KD (Purab Kohli) makes tunes for corporate houses and aspires for the band to work together once more.
Enter Jiah (Shraddha Kapoor) and Uday (Shashank Arora) who infuse a new dimension to Magik’s music.
The band pledges to conduct a massive music concert to help reconstruct a Meghalya village and musicians from all over the country become a part of it.
The film’s music is scintillating to the core and one can enjoy a crunching number composed and performed by Shillong-based band Somersault and Usha Uthup.Beautiful locales and amazing photography are some other incentives associated with the movie.
Hindustan Times
Eight years after Rock On went on to win hearts and awards, its sequel, Rock On 2, which is a far better film than what its trailers suggest, could follow suit.
Rock On ended with Rob’s (Luke Kenny) death and the reuniting of the all-boy band Magik. Things have changed since then. Aditya Shroff (Farhan Akhtar) is again delusional. He has left music and does cooperative farming somewhere in the Northeast.
Joe (Arjun Rampal) is a reality show judge and a club owner. He appears to be the most successful of the lot.
KD (Purab Kohli) thinks the band should come together again to infuse some purpose in their lives, but that doesn’t seem possible.
And here come Jiah (Shraddha Kapoor) and Uday (Shashank Arora), promising but untapped talents to carry on the legacy of Magik.
The use of the Northeastern milieu pays back towards the end when the emotions explode out of the claustrophobic spaces.
Like Rock On, this one is also about the male bonding, on and off the stage. Shraddha Kapoor’s presence adds a different dimension to it.
Mumbai Mirror
A sequel to the story of desi rock group Magik, this one begins a few years on from where the last one left us. Once a lead vocalist, now a farm coordinator in a remote village in Meghalaya, Adi (Farhan Akhtar) has blatantly-suggestive unresolved issues that drove him to this isolation.
The rest of the band members have embraced logical career transitions. Joe (Arjun Rampal) is now a reality show judge and owns a club and the grizzly locked KD (Purab Kohli) has resigned to a sober haircut and career option to match — he composes tunes for those with little opinion on music.
When a fire destroys Adi’s village, he returns to Mumbai and to music, once coaxed by his friends. The idea is to host the mother of all charity concerts. This is when the estranged music group chances upon Jiah and Uday (Shashank Arora), a sarod player who doubles up as a bassist. The rest of the film covers their challenges in putting up a rock show despite opposition from local authorities and how some of them deal with the skeletons of their connected past.
For a film about musicians, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy pack in tracks that lack punch and the murdered version of Aerosmith’s Sweet Emotion (Jaago) would make Pritam proud.
The film does well to endorse Meghalaya’s tourism potential. The rolling hills of the North-Eastern state resemble heaps of finely ground matcha and cinematographer Marc Koninckx captures them in a manner to distract us from the proceedings.
