Asoo Billa became a sizeable box office smash in the first half of 2001 running to packed houses all over the country in the pre-Osama lull before the storm. It is difficult to imagine why this particular film scored a bull’s eye while so many others that appear to be identical in theme and execution and actors failed.
The film is your typical run of the mill revenge mayhem potboiler where we watch the mild mannered, law abiding, peace loving, god fearing Asoo (Shaan) confronted by a series of terrible circumstances which ultimately force him to take up a violent crusade of his own against the perpetrators of evil and injustice. This theme is basically a blue print for 90% of all Lollywood Punjabi movies and it seems to be nothing short of a miracle that the audiences lap this sort of thing up time after time after time. This film features Shaan in the title role and for half the movie we watch him in subdued mode as the mild mannered innocent blue eyed boy who lives only for the joys of saying his prayers and serving his goody-two-shoes parents. Asoo has a mate Ghiasia who has just been released from jail where he did time for murdering the men who looked at his sister with a “dirty eye”. Now Ghiasia (Baber Ali resembling Pran in Don with his brown curly wig) is back in the pind and life is blissful until one fateful day everything goes horribly wrong. Asoo’s father who works in a local godown finds that “poe-durr” (heroin) is being smuggled from the godown and he being the upright, virtuous (idiotic) type decides that he absolutely must blow his own trumpet and go to the police to blow the whistle on the nefarious drug smuggling operation going on under his own very nose at the behest of his own employers.
