annavetticadgoes2themovies: REVIEW 273: HUMSHAKALS

Friday, June 20, 2014

REVIEW 273: HUMSHAKALS

Release date:	June 20, 2014
Director:	Sajid Khan
Cast: Language:	Saif Ali Khan, Riteish Deshmukh, Ram Kapoor, Bipasha Basu, Tamannaah Bhatia, Esha Gupta, Satish Shah, Chunkey Pandey, Darshan Zariwala Hindi

1. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

2. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

3. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

4. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

5. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

6. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

7. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

8. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

9. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

10. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

11. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

12. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

13. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

14. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

15. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

16. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

17. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

18. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

19. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

20. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

21. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

22. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

23. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

24. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

25. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

26. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

27. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

28. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

29. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

30. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

31. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

32. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

33. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

34. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

35. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

36. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

37. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

38. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

39. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

40. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

41. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

42. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

43. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

44. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

45. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

46. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

47. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

48. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

49. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

50. I should have 0 expectations from a Sajid Khan film

Remember how some schoolteachers would punish us for our mischief by making us write a sentence 10 / 50 / 100 times on a blackboard or in a notebook? Well, this is me punishing myself for being an incorrigible optimist in my self-inflicted job as a film critic.

Humshakals is as flat as cola from a bottle that’s been left open for a year. Read that clearly please: I didn’t say one day, or one month, or six months, but an entire year. The problem is not that it’s asinine (hey, asinine can sometimes be enjoyable!), but that it’s desperate – desperate to be hilarious, desperately imitative, desperate to hide the desperation of a team of writers (director Sajid Khan himself, Robin Bhatt and Akarsh Khurana) who have clearly run out of ideas.

This inexplicable mish-mash of Sajid’s own earlier films and other projects features a London-based billionaire Indian businessman called Ashok Singhania (Saif Ali Khan) who does terrible stand-up comedy as a hobby, his best friend and business associate Kumar (Riteish Deshmukh) and Ashok’s scheming uncle Kunwar Amar Nath Singh, the initials of whose name gives us the acronym Kans. This modern-day avatar of Lord Krishna’s evil uncle is played by Ram Kapoor. Kans Maama’s effort to cheat Ashok out of his empire is kneaded into a mix that includes two patients in a mental asylum who happen to be Ashok and Kumar’s look-alikes and namesakes, plus two gay men called Chinku and Pinku who undergo plastic surgery to look like Ashok and Kumar, in addition to two doppelgangers of Kans, one called Johnny who is an inmate of a home for the criminally insane and the other a Punjabi nightclub owner known as Balbir. Get that? Three Saifs, three Riteishes and three Rams.

The only Sajid Khan film in which a heroine mattered somewhat was Heyy Babyy starring Vidya Balan. That was seven years back. Since then all his films have featured women as mere showpieces who make brief appearances to wear sexy clothing, dance with the boys and fall for them. This film gives its ladies even shorter shrift – and possibly shorter skirts – than Housefull, Housefull 2 and Himmatwala did. And so Bipasha Basu in tiny tight outfits plays Ashok’s employee and Kumar’s girlfriend Mishti, Tamannaah Bhatia in tiny tight outfits is a reality show host and Ashok’s lady love Shania, and Esha Gupta in tiny tight outfits plays Dr Shivani Gupta who Ashok’s mentally ill lookalike is in love with. Whew! Never mind about the others, but it really feels sad to see a female star of Bipasha’s standing reduced to a curio with just a handful of lines in a film.

Someone should have told Team Humshakals that writing comedy – even slapstick comedy – requires imagination and intelligence; that the world’s best comedians require solid writing to back them. Saif and Riteish are comic aces on a good day but are remarkably unremarkable throughout this film. As for a fine actor like Ram… did someone tell him that commercial comedy is compulsorily shallow, low-IQ stuff?

Here is a representative sample of this tepid film’s terrible un-funniness: At one point, Kans Maama is trying to have sex with his lookalike who is dressed in drag. Meaning: the very large Ram Kapoor dressed as a woman… Aiyyoooo! When Kans pushes the reluctant ‘woman’ down on a bed, it breaks. She says with triumphant relief: Look, we can’t do anything since the bistar is broken! The man replies: But you are a bistar yourself. “Main bistar nahin, sister hoon,” she retorts. “Aur main sinister hoon,” says he, as he unbuttons himself. Huh? Meaning whaaaattt?

Of course this silly film features racial and other stereotypes much loved by Bollywood, all filled out by marginal characters in brief appearances: two small-sized men who are addressed as “Thapa (because of the shape of his eyes) aur uske Papa”, two gay men who are – but of course – effeminate and sexually obsessed, a Christian man called Albert who – but of course – is a drunk, and a chap called Srinivasan who speaks Hindi with Bollywood’s idea of a ‘Madrasi’ accent. There are jokes involving people in comas, those with serious disabilities, and pretty much anyone who is dealing with misfortune. Political incorrectness can be so much fun when it’s cleverly done. In the hands of talentless writers, it can be hurtful and offensive. Humshakals is neither of the above. It’s so bland, so loosely handled, so repetitive and so boring, that I wasn’t even offended.

The only genuinely amusing part of Humshakals is the fact that Sajid recycles tropes from his earlier films in an audaciously transparent fashion here. Was he assuming that we have poor memories? If Housefull had the song Papa jag jayega sung late at night in a castle by two young couples even as they tried to evade the sleepwalking father of one of the girls, Humshakals has Barbaad raat sung by two young couples in a castle late at night while a middle-aged mental asylum warden skulks around the building. Kumar even mouths a ‘joke’ that’s been used and re-used umpteen times elsewhere: Hamara bad luck kharaab chal rahaa hai. Uff! And then there’s the fact that the climax of Housefull was set in a British palace among a crowd of white-skinned foreigners, while the climax of Humshakals is set in the British House of Commons in the midst of – c’mon guess! – a crowd of white-skinned foreigners including Prince Charles!

Juvenility, you see, is not Humshakals’ only crime. Insipidity and lack of originality are its primary problems. What else does one say of a non-kids-film in which one of the ‘jokes’ is this name of a mental asylum in the UK: Lord Cray G. Mental Asylum. Double uff!

Before you assume that I’m being unnecessarily “intellectual” in my response to a deliberately mindless film, let me give you an idea of my minimal expectations from such comedies: unlike most of my fellow film critics, I actually had quite a bit of fun watching Housefull. Housefull 2 was offensive though. And Himmatwala was an unqualified disaster.

The best thing I can say about Humshakals is that it’s marginally better than Himmatwala.