Cinemaah

Come Off It Guys!


It’s shameful that we gloat about being the biggest film industry in the world, and now, with all the money and technology at the successful filmmaker’s disposal, still rip off ideas from 25 (or more) year old Hollywood films.

The funkiness of Vipul Shah’s Action Replayy (idea stolen from the classic Back to the Future) is all in the ads and promos.  The seventies’ psychedelic look is cute in small doses but not when the screen looks like someone poured buckets of primary colours over the frames. The seventies were not the way today’s silly spoofy films are portraying them… only Farah Khan got the retro spoof element right in Om Shanti Om. Now everyone seems to be copying her take, and not doing even doing their own research.

Bunty (Aditya Roy Kapoor) has problem parents, and if has to make a success of his own relationship, he should repair theirs. Easily done… a trip to the past via a time travel machine (Prof Anthony Gonsalves has one handy) and he can go turn his nerdy dad (Akshay Kumar) into a charmer and his tomboyish mom (Aishwarya Rai) into a simperer and make them fall in love.  But how did they get married in the first place, if they didn’t approve of each other?

The film is scripted and directed with such a contempt for detail, flat humour, much noise and not one glorious hear-soaring moment—of which there were plenty in Back to the Future, if only they’d seen the film more carefully and learnt some lessons.

The attractive lead pair, neither a great actor, at least make the film bearable. The rest of the cast Rannvijay, Om Puri, Rajpal Yadav, Kirron Kher, Neha Dhupia, Randhir Kapoor and the rest just go through the (exaggerated) motions. If there’s one word needed to describe the film it would, unfortunately, be tacky.

What? Again?

Golmaal 3 is an odd bird of a film.  It takes its plot from Basu Chatterjee’s Khatta Meetha (which took it from Hollywood’s Yours, Mine and Ours), and then goes for a full-on Mithun Chakraborthy tribute, with the man paying homage to himself; or making fun of himself, if you prefer.

Mithun films and B-grade Bollywood films of the seventies have become the stuff of nostalgia, but when they were actually released, most of those feeling so affectionate towards them now, must have groaned through them---the tacky, gauche, loud, stereotyped junk, sometimes, wrapped in good music. We cringed when we saw Disco Dancer, now sensible people write books on it. Ah well!

Rohit Shetty found himself a set of good actors, who ostensibly have a sense of humour, at least some of the goofball stuff that happens in the film couldn’t have been written or rehearsed.  It doesn’t take much of thinking and plotting to keep the franchise going now.  All that is needed is some running gags and some stuff to fill in the spaces between. Golmaal 3 has a man who breaks any finger that wags at him, one guy who stutters, one who is mute and a don who has short  term memory loss (think Ghajini and there’s a tribute to that too).  People expect laughs, they want to laugh and if they are so determined to, they will.  Let’s hope they also stop to wonder why all those cars and speedboats are being blown up and those shops smashed, and innocent bystanders being thrown from heights?

Gopal (Ajay Devgan), Laxman (Shreyas Talpade) and Daboo (Kareena Kapoor) on one side, the Geeta or Ratna Pathak Shah side.  Madhav (Arshad Warsi), Laxman (Kunal Khemu) and Lucky (Tusshar Kapoor) belong to the Pritam or Mithun Chakraborthy side.  They are constantly at loggerheads and bent on destroying one another.

Then, Daboo discovers that the “Aunty” and “Uncle” have a past. Way back when he was a disco dancer and she a blushing maiden in pigtails, her rich Prem Chopra dad (played by Prem Chopra) had separated them.  So she lies and connives to get them married in their old age, and then all hell erupts in Geeta’s lovely Goan home, which you hope to hell was a set; or if it wasn’t, then that it wasn’t wrecked by the rambunctious film crew.

Because there has to be some way of bringing the mayhem to an end, the forgetful don (Johnny Lever) contributes to a weak-ish climax with a stolen necklace, otherwise when all the “kids”  (if you call this overgrown bunch that) stop fighting, the film – and its profusion of “bum” gags—is really over.  Points to ponder, why, in 2010 should Pritam and Geeta have to be parents of adopted kids and not their own?  Why are banners of a kitchenware brand so prominently displayed when the film doesn’t even care about food storage!

Golmaal 3 offers more spot the in-reference fun than real gags, and noise substitutes for acting, but they are all so eager to please, so desperate to make you laugh, that the least you can do is buy a ticket. What’s the option?  Action Replayy? (Shudder)