Signing on a bunch of known comic faces cannot ensure rollicking entertainment. Giving grating characteristics like a funny voice to Manoj Joshi, Rajpal Yadav, Vijay Raaz, Annu Kapoor, Manjot Singh, Asrani and Paresh Rawal does not guarantee fun. And not getting the comic sur right away is a premise for disaster.
Director Raaj Shaandilyaa’s mess begins with a jagran where, instead of anything remotely spiritual, Karam (Ayushmann Khurrana) and Pari (Ananya Panday) gyrate to a tuneless Hindi film number with dozens of chorus dancers.
It’s a sacrilege not to Mata but to comedy too.
Shaandilyaa and writing partner Naresh Kathooria fall back on a time-worn ultimatum from the girlfriend’s father to the unemployed lover: get a job, build a bank balance and buy a house before you marry my daughter.
And so Karam has to stick oranges on his chest and turn into seductress Pooja with fluttering eyelashes to make quick money and win his girl.
A weary tale of nightclub owner Sonabhai (Vijay Raaz) lusting after Pooja, a rich Muslim father (Paresh Rawal) desiring Pooja as the bride for his son Shah Rukh (Abhishek Banerjee), a credit card collector falling in love with Pooja’s voice over the phone, and a much-married elderly phuphijaan (Seema Pahwa) wanting Karam as her next husband…the sequences roll on without eliciting a chuckle. Packed with ridiculous romantic scenes between Annu Kapoor and Seema, Seema and Ayushmann, Ayushmann with Vijay Raaz and Ayushmann in bed with Abhishek Banerjee, it is an unenjoyable 133 minutes. Topped with carelessly composed songs and routinely choreographed dances.
The lines are laboured too with oft-repeated references to how long an old man will live. Dialogues like, “Kapil Sharma comes once a week. I come 24/7 without a break” and “You are that flop which I saw after interval”, fall as flat as a chappati.
A school principal insisting that only English should be spoken until Sonabhai wears her down and she breaks into a string of Hindi abuses, an attempt at black comedy around a dead body, and Ayushmann switching from Karam to Pooja and back again, climaxes with Karam/Pooja giving a dreary lecture with no new thought to every character in the film.
It was fun the first time around when Ayushmann Khurrana went from seductive female to normal male but loses its novelty when it’s repeated ad nauseam with little wit to pepper it.
As for Ananya Panday, oh, dear, what was her role in this humourless hotchpotch?
Rating: 1.5/5
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