Rajeev Masand – movies that matter : from bollywood, hollywood and everywhere else

June 24, 2011

Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Ritesh Deshmukh, Arshad Warsi, Ashish Choudhary, Javed Jaffrey, Mallika Sherawat, Kangana Ranaut

Director: Indra Kumar

In a scene in Double Dhamaal Ritesh Deshmukh, disguised as an older Gujarati businessman, twice whacks Sanjay Dutt in the nuts by swinging his golf club in the wrong direction. Dutt winces in pain. Given the standard of humor in this film, it’s a fairly funny scene. And director Indra Kumar knows it. Which is why he throws in another scene in which a gorilla is kicked in the groin. And then another one in which Dutt lines up Ritesh and his buddies and whacks each of them in the crotch with a golf ball. How many times do you repeat the same gag, before it stops being funny?

Double Dhamaal, unlike the 2007 film whose sequel it is, has absolutely no plot to speak of. The film’s entirely unfunny first half involves Dutt conning the four protagonists – Ritesh Deshmukh, Arshad Warsi, Ashish Choudhary and Javed Jaffrey – into selling sewage water as oil. The tables turn in the second half, when the boys decide to strip Dutt of his ill-earned riches and his joy. Their hare-brained plan involves changing many disguises so they can dupe him without it being traced back to them. So at one point Ashish Choudhary slips into a monkey suit, and must kiss face with a real gorilla. (If you think that’s sick, wait till you see him in a slinky dress, baring enough cleavage to put Rakhi Sawant to shame). Ritesh Deshmukh smears black face-paint and wears an Afro wig so he can pretend to be a Caribbean lover-boy who seduces Dutt’s sister. Arshad Warsi poses as a smart sardar who offers to handle the security of Dutt’s casino. And Javed Jaffrey, the ‘slow’ one in the group, pretends to be….umm…a slightly ‘slower’ version of himself.

The only genuinely clever bits in Double Dhamaal are the repeated film references. There are jokes directed at Guzaarish, Taare Zameen Par, Peepli Live, and even at the actors in this very film. Satish Kaushik’s character, an underworld figure named Batabhai, repeatedly insults the younger foursome by beckoning them with such names as “Multi-star cast ke side hero” and “Hit film ke flop hero”.

But little else tickles the funny bone here. Actors yell out their lines instead of saying them, every gag is repeated over and over again, and the double entendres get tiresome after a point. Mallika Sherawat and Kangana Ranaut, who star as Dutt’s girlfriend and sister respectively, are easy on the eye but make as much of an impression in this film as good-looking wallpaper does in an ugly room.

The earlier Dhamaal, although generously copied from It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, had several moments of inspired lunacy. This sequel is a lazy effort made on a bigger budget, but evidently with half the integrity and spirit.

I’m going with one-and-a-half out of five for director Indra Kumar’s Double Dhamaal. Aside from a few laughs post-intermission, this film is a crashing bore.

(This review first aired on CNN-IBN)

June 17, 2011

Cast: Vinay Pathak, Kay Kay Menon, Suresh Menon, Amole Gupte, Minnisha Lamba

Director: Sagar Bellary

Bheja Fry 2, directed by Sagar Bellary, is a disappointing and not-so-funny follow-up to the original 2007 comedy that starred Vinay Pathak as a bumbling tax inspector who inadvertently turns the tables on a man intending to make a laughing stock out of him. In the new film, Pathak reprises his role as Bharat Bhushan, but the lovably dimwitted man-child has turned into an annoying oaf this time round.

The action unfolds on a luxury cruise and a marooned island in Bheja Fry 2, and Kay Kay Menon stars as the fraudster businessman whose turn it is to be mentally battered by our eccentric protagonist. Yes, Bharat Bhushan is still a fan of the golden oldies and breaks into an evergreen track at the drop of a hat. But you have little patience for his idiosyncracies now, which have gotten stale.

Joining the cast is Amole Gupte who plays a mad photographer on the island, and Suresh Menon who takes the part of Bhushan’s colleague, an earnest tax inspector investigating Kay Kay Menon. The laughs are fewer, the jokes less funny, and the set-up entirely familiar. Vinay Pathak succeeds in delivering a few moments of genuine comedy, but for the most part good actors like Kay Kay Menon and Amole Gupte are wasted in this lazily-scripted mess.

I’m going with one-and-a-half out of five for Bheja Fry 2. The original film, although entirely plagiarized, had a charming innocence to complement its outrageous humor. This one is dead dull, and a total waste of two precious hours.

(This review first aired on CNN-IBN)

June 17, 2011

Cast: Ali Fazal, Satyajeet Dubey, Giselle Monteiro, Zoa Morani, Satish Shah, Lilette Dubey, Navneet Nishan

Director: Roshan Abbas

Set on a sprawling Delhi campus where students spend the bulk of their time attending drama rehearsals or dancing merrily in the corridors, Always Kabhi Kabhi directed by Roshan Abbas channels those breezy High School Musical movies…but alas this film doesn’t have the infectious charm of those feel-good Disney entertainers.

The kids in this film are your usual stereotypes: you have the resident nerd (played by Satyajeet Dubey), the firebrand (played by Zoa Morani), the charmer (played by Ali Fazal), and the pretty new head-turner (played by Giselle Monteiro). There’s little by way of plot here – the school’s putting up a production of Romeo & Juliet, and our four leads sign up for assorted duties. Alongside we get a glimpse of their troubled home lives. The nerd is under pressure from his overbearing father to get admission into MIT, the short-tempered, snappy one longs for the attention of her busy parents, the pretty one is being bullied into realizing her mother’s unfulfilled dreams, and Mr Popular has a strained relationship with his worrying father.

Much in the same sloppy vein as Faltu recently, the larger theme that’s addressed here is the lack of communication between adults and their children. Pretty much all parents are painted as villains, while teenagers are dubbed the misunderstood generation. Some of this might have worked if the characters or their situations felt authentic. But very little feels real or relatable in this film, aside from the sporadic use of status updates to take the narrative forward, and the exasperation of parents watching their kids spend so much time texting on the mobile phones.

The real problem is that the film neither feels accurately representative of this generation and its lifestyle, nor does it have an aspirational quality to it like those campus portions of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai did all those years ago. As a result it feels very boring, and a closing-credits item-song featuring Shah Rukh Khan doesn’t redeem it in any way.

Of the cast, Ali Fazal has a likeable presence, and Zoa Morani is blessed with abundant confidence. The clumsy script however, which throws in everything from a teenage pregnancy scare to a drugs bust, is limp to say the least despite the involvement of four writers.

I’m going with one-and-a-half out of five for director Roshan Abbas’ Always Kabhi Kabhi. Watching this film is like attending a concert put up by ten-year-olds. It’s amateurish, and tedious to sit through, and the only thing you can appreciate in the end is the earnestness behind the effort.

(This review first aired on CNN-IBN)

June 10, 2011

Cast: Kalki Koechlin, Gulshan Devaiya, Shiv Pandit, Neil Bhoopalam, Kirti Kulhari, Rajeev Khandelwal

Director: Bejoy Nambiar

Hindi cinema seldom makes films about unapologetically amoral characters. The protagonists in director Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan are a group of five wayward youngsters who snort cocaine, get drunk, and drive around recklessly through the streets of Mumbai. This is a group of mostly ‘poor-little-rich-kids’ who’re emotionally estranged from their families. When they mow down two innocent people in a rash-driving accident, they must come up with big money to close the case. Going to their parents is not an option; hence one of them, Amy (played by Kalki Koechlin), an NRI with unresolved mommy issues, suggests that her friends fake her kidnapping so they can demand ransom from her dad. Expectedly their plan spirals wildly out of control, and that’s when the devil inside each of them decides to rear its ugly head.

First-time-feature director Nambiar tells his story confidently and stylishly, and uses various narrative devices like voice-overs and flashbacks-within-flashbacks to keep things from getting predictable. One of the film’s most exciting sequences is a shootout and subsequent chase in a crowded chawl cut to a remixed version of the classic song Khoya khoya chand.

But Nambiar punctures the narrative repeatedly with Kalki’s visions of her mother, and those flashbacks serve no purpose but to justify and apologize for Kalki’s eccentric personality, which in turn is a disservice to the very bravura of this film. It’s hard also to connect with these characters or empathize with their condition when Nambiar seems to be putting all his effort into distracting you with his fancy technical skills.

He has more luck when he shifts his focus to the track involving the tightly wound cop (played by Rajeev Khandelwal) who remains unfalteringly committed to his job, even as his marriage is coming apart. There is a smoldering intensity to those wordless scenes in which Khandelwal watches his wife leave their home, or when he loses his patience with a bureaucratic officer in the divorce court. Khandelwal is easily this film’s biggest strength, and even his tiniest moments have something to offer – like that scene in which he kicks a resistant auto-rickshaw driver into action.

The film’s other key weapon is its remarkable soundtrack that is credited to as many as five composers. Nambiar uses music cleverly to maximize dramatic impact. Of the central cast, the three boys – Neil Bhoopalam as Zubin, Shiv Pandit as the rakishly charming Dash, and Gulshan Devaiya as KC – get a better shot than the girls at realizing their characters. But the film itself goes south post intermission, with giant loopholes in the plot and repetitive scenes, not to mention that cop-out climax. What could have been a terrific, thrilling film is ultimately an impressive first-time feature. Nevertheless, Nambiar makes a confident debut and delivers a brave, engaging film that shouldn’t be missed.

I’m going with three out of five for director Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan. It isn’t as daring as Anurag Kashyap’s debut Paanch whose themes it clearly mirrors, but it’s got many moments that’ll surprise you.

(This review first aired on CNN-IBN)