Saturday, January 04, 2014
Mr Joe B. Carvalho
Clumsy Does It!
There is a strange industry superstition that films releasing in the
first week of January don’t do well, so invariably no-hopers like Mr Joe B. Carvalho get to the theatres.
They flop, making this a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Looks like director Samir Tiwari and his team fell
off their chairs laughing at the clever title they had thought up, and forgot
to write the rest of the script. They seem to have left it to the actors to
cobble something as they went along, and the result is a turkey-sized dud.
Arshad Warsi playing the eponymous detective an
idiot with a blind mother (Himani Shivpuri), who keeps falling off
balconies. He finally gets a case from a
Khurana (Shakti Kapoor), to look for his daughter who has run off with the
cook.
At the same hotel checks in a hitman so deadly,
that just uttering his came kills—and Jaaved Jaaferi plays Carlos mostly in
drag. He also sucks on a lollipop and has a conversation with his parents in
their voices. Jaaferi is an excellent
comic and mimic, but he should be given something substantial to do. He just
keeps getting into weird disguises and spouting matching accents.
Joe is mistaken for the terrorist and has a cop
Shantipriya (Soha Ali Khan), also his ex-girlfriend on his trail, plus a
gangster MK (Vijay Raaz) and his sidekicks. The root of all the confusion is an
African 'general' called Kopa Kabana. With the excuse of going undercover,
Shantipriya gets to do a cabaret number and lounge by poolsides in bikinis.
The idea of humour is having people fly into the
air or fall into ditches or die in strange ways when they utter Carlos’s name.
And everybody, with the exception of Arshad Warsi acts in a ‘look at me I am
acting so funny’ mode. Warsi gets the comic tone right, pointless though in a
film that doesn’t have two laughs to rub together.
By the end of it, when all the characters gather at
one spot for the climax, the audience is either crying with relief, or asleep
with boredom. The year can only get better after this.
Labels: Cinemaah
