REVIEW 750: PAGALPANTI

Release date:	November 22, 2019
Director:	Anees Bazmee
Cast: Language:	Anil Kapoor, John Abraham, Ileana D’Cruz, Arshad Warsi, Pulkit Samrat, Kriti Kharbanda, Saurabh Shukla, Brijendra Kala, Urvashi Rautela, Inaamulhaq, Zakir Hussain Hindi

Pagalpanti (Madness) is what happens when Anees Bazmee gets a couple of good ideas in the middle of a creative drought, but does not quite know what to do with them. Bazmee is not someone who can be dismissed as a mindless, crude comic in the league of Sajid Khan. He is, after all, the director who served up Anil Kapoor and Nana Patekar in top goofy form in Welcome (2007), and brought a degree of freshness to the stereotypical Bollywood representation of boisterous Punjabis in Singh Is Kinng (2008). Just two years back, he did a ripping job with the Anil Kapoor, Arjun Kapoor, Ileana D’Cruz starrer Mubarakan.

Pagalpanti is not Bazmee’s worst. Gosh no, that distinction goes to No Problem. But it is not a patch on his funnest works either.

Bazmee appears to have been struggling when he kicked off Pagalpanti. Nothing else can explain why he and his co-writers Rajiv Kaul and Praful Parekh chose to rehash for this film so many elements from successful Hindi slapstick comedies of the past decade. For a start, they picked a hero who is a ‘panauti’, just like Akshay Kumar’s character in the first Housefull. They added to that a mansion housing a beautiful female ghost, as in Great Grand Masti, going so far as to cast that film’s bhootni, Urvashi Rautela, in this one too. And if stampeding camels wreaked havoc in the climax of Welcome Back, here that job falls on the shoulders of a trio of lions.

The screenplay does nothing to any of these tropes to elevate them to the level of tributes. Even the twist in the bhootni’s tale does not serve that purpose. In between the writers do have a couple of good ideas, but those and the ensemble cast that includes some fine actors are all overshadowed by the overall lack of novelty in the story and treatment of Pagalpanti.

Raj Kishore (John Abraham), Junky (Arshad Warsi) and Chandu (Pulkit Samrat) are friends and failed business partners. Raj is supposed to be an unlucky guy who destroys the fortunes of all those around him too, but his buddies stay with him. When their paths cross with the Indian gangster brothers Raja Sahab (Saurabh Shukla) and Wi-Fi (Anil Kapoor) in London, these two dreaded men choose to hire them despite knowing that Raj Kishore’s mere presence can spell doom in their lives. No credible reason is offered for their decision.

What follows is a series of financial disasters, chases, exploding cars, the escalation of Raja and Wi-Fi’s long-running feud with fellow gangsters Tulli and Bulli, and a new-found enmity with a crook called Niraj Modi (you read the name right) who cheated Indian banks of thousands of crores before fleeing the country.

That last chap is played by Inaamulhaq, styled very precisely to look like the actual Nirav Modi. The obvious allusion to a high-profile real-life fugitive is interesting at first, until the scenario wears thin once it becomes clear that the writers do not know where to go with what started out as a clever move.

There is a point at which humour unexpectedly makes way for patriotic fervour, when Wi-Fi is given a passionate lecture about love for the country (meaning, India – of course – and not the United Kingdom which he has made his home). Just when it seems like Team Pagalpanti may be getting subversive and having a giggle at the expense of Bollywood’s hyper-nationalist brigade who have been churning out loud deshbhakti films in the past three years or so, they chicken out, and the scene ends tamely. This particular passage is unwittingly amusing in its effort not to appear too fixated on its desh prem, especially since it is clearly fixated on the same market as those aforementioned films.

It is always nice to watch Kapoor and Warsi letting their hair down, and they do manage to extract some laughs in Pagalpanti’s best moments. Years of facing the camera have given even Abraham a certain comfort with comedy that he did not initially have, and that too is nice to see. The younger members of the cast acquit themselves reasonably well, although they have not that much to do. Besides, there is only so much that actors can achieve in the face of lack of innovation.

The one effective aspect of Pagalpanti is that it continuously laughs at its genre. It does this primarily through the medium of Junky (Warsi) who rhymes words while he speaks and delivers lines rather than having normal conversations with people – each time he says something he is particularly impressed with, he expresses disbelief at his own smartness. Later, when Raj Kishore vomits out a monologue, he too responds to his own words in a similar fashion.

It is hard to be totally angry with a self-mocking film, especially considering that Bazmee manages to run through 165 minutes without a single wisecrack about rape, disability, farts and faeces, which have been favoured fodder in Hindi film comedies for some years now. But not being angry with a film, not disliking it is not the same as enjoying it. Pagalpanti is sporadically entertaining, but for the most part it feels stale and ordinary. Even the appearance of a Méhul Choksi lookalike in the end cannot lift the film out of its plainness. References to current events work if you have a take on them. Pagalpanti has none.

Rating (out of five stars): 1.5

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	152 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/pagalpanti-movie-review-john-abraham-co-goof-around-in-a-rehash-of-bollywood-comedy-cliches-7687401.html

Poster courtesy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagalpanti_(2019_film)

REVIEW 512: MUBARAKAN

Release date:	July 28, 2017
Director:	Anees Bazmee
Cast: Language:	Anil Kapoor, Arjun Kapoor, Ratna Pathak Shah, Pavan Malhotra, Ileana D’Cruz, Neha Sharma, Athiya Shetty, Rahul Dev, Karan Kundra, Sanjay Kapoor Hindi

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been longing for a silly, fun yet not lazily offensive or gross Hindi comedy for a while. Too many Bollywood writers and directors have for too long now resorted to certain IQ-averse formulae to tickle the audience’s funny bone.

One, rhyming dialogue. What on earth is that about?

Two, jokes directed at the marginalised and disadvantaged. It takes a particularly slothful and insensitive kind of creative bankruptcy to laugh at victims of rape and domestic violence, persons with disabilities (PwDs), LGBT persons and others who you assume do not dominate your audience and/or control most purse strings at turnstiles. Himmat aur dimaag hai toh find ways to mock rapists, wife beaters, homophobes and sarkari afsars who are apathetic to PwDs.

Three, crudeness. You know, wisecracks about butt cracks, balls, boobs, potty and gas emissions from the posterior.

Yawn.

At his worst, director Anees Bazmee has been guilty of many of the above crimes. For proof, suffer No Problem, Thank You and Ready. At his best though, Bazmee has done what David Dhawan and the much-maligned Rohit Shetty at their best have done: provide us with comic relief from our daily struggles, without making us feel foolish or tapping into our basest instincts.

Hedunnit with the screwball comedy Welcome in 2007 and Singh Is Kiing in 2008. His new film Mubarakan is not exactly a match, but it resides on the same plane as those two: slapstick, crazy, over-the-top, even loud, yet not cheap, lewd or loud-for-the-sake-of-being-loud.

The starting point of this comedy of errors is Kartar Singh (Anil Kapoor), whose brother and bhabi die in a car accident one night, leaving behind twin infant sons. Twins have long been a favourite with writers of farce, William Shakespeare being the most exalted of them. Kartar is overwhelmed by the job of bringing up the kids, so he hands Karan over to his London-based big sister Jeeto (Ratna Pathak Shah) and Charan to his Baldev pra (Pavan Malhotra) in Punjab.

The babies grow up to be the strapping Arjun Kapoor, both bearded, though Charan is turbanned (did I mention they are Sikhs?) while Karan is not. That difference helps the confounded viewer only partly, since the confusion in Mubarakan arises not just from the boys’ identical looks, but also from the fact that Karan loves Sweety Gill (Ileana D’Cruz), Charan loves Nafisa Qureshi (Neha Sharma) and neither has the courage to disclose their relationship to their respective adoptive parents, as a result of which each Mummyji and Papaji in the reckoning fixes up their betaji with another woman, causing Kartar to think up ridiculous solutions to the mess, that make things worse – of course – leading to a fight between Charan’s Buaji and Karan’s Chachaji.

(Pause, while the critic catches her breath)

Angry words pile up on angry words and misunderstandings pile up on misunderstandings until, as in real life, the original cause of the tension matters less than the egos involved.

Also in the fray is Binkle (Athiya Shetty), daughter of a rich man called Sandhu (Rahul Dev).

Binkle Sandhu. Teehee. Yes, like Binkle from Enid Blyton’s tales of two naughty rabbits named Binkle and Flip. Punjabis and Malayalis have certainly cornered the world’s weirdest names.

There’s more than Binkle’s name to evoke laughter here though. The first half of Mubarakan is unrelentingly hilarious. Bazmee does not sustain that momentum post interval – because he stretches it needlessly to 156 minutes – but Anil Kapoor as Kartar is such an uninhibited riot that it is tempting to forgive the film its elongation. The second half does not have enough of Kapoor, but what we do get of him is worth the price of five tickets.

His nephew Arjun effectively conveys the difference between the cocky Karan and his more diffident brother Charan, though the uncle and his young female co-stars manage to steal some of his thunder. To be fair to Arjun, the ladies play more interesting characters.

It is nice to see the beautiful Ileana D’Cruz evolving as a comedian with Mubarakan. Equally enjoyable is Neha Sharma as the fiery though less charming Nafisa who, by the way, is in a profession rarely assigned to Hindi film women – she’s a lawyer. The only dull performance comes from Athiya Shetty as Binkle, although to be fair – again – Binkle herself is a dullard.

Most Bollywood comedies in the past two decades have offered better-written parts to male actors and given primacy to their characters, while women have inhabited the sidelines. Mubarakan is different in the sense that among the younger lot, it offers more exciting roles to the women than the men, and also because it is an ensemble film in the true sense of the term.

Kapoor Sr, Ratna Pathak Shah and Pavan Malhotra have the benefit of the additional charisma that age lends to already charismatic artistes. When Kartar, Jeeto and Baldev are on screen in Mubarakan, it is impossible to look at anyone else.

The gifted Malhotra has not yet got his due – in terms of roles and recognition – from mainstream Bollywood, so it is a joy to see him rocking a substantial part in an out-and-out masala flick like Mubarakan. Also a pleasure is the sight of Shah in prominent roles in film after film in the last couple of years. Her uproariously maudlin and over-sensitive Jeeto follows the sharply contrasting Leela in Lipstick Under My Burkha, released just days before Mubarakan.

Is there stereotyping in this film? Of course there is, but although Mubarakan plays up a particular comical view of Sikhs and Punjabis, the fact is it laughs affectionately with a community, not patronisingly or contemptuously at them. More important, despite occupying that space, it does away with many of Bollywood’s more nauseating Punjabi/Sikh clichés. No one, for instance, says “balle balle” with each breath or indulges in identity-centric buffoonery. This choice is worth far more than the mandatory tribute to Sikh bravery you find as compensation in most such Bollywood comedies (and here too in a song), designed to appease the Sikh clergy that has proved to be disappointingly touchy and nosy in the past decade.

One episode in the film does briefly seem headed in the direction of “baarah baj gaye” territory – yup, that tired joke targeting Sardarjis – but thankfully it does not go there. It takes skill to write entertaining, relaxing rubbish without being regressive, and except for fleeting taunts directed a couple of times at wives and at Kartar’s singleton status, the rest is surprisingly okay. 

In Kartar’s beleaguered gora sidekick Jolly (played by American actor Alexx O’Neill), the film even cocks a snook at that old Hollywood staple: the white leading man’s wacky black flunkey.

(Spoiler alert) The most intriguing aspect of Mubarakan is the inclusion of Nafisa Qureshi. When Hindu-Muslim tensions are at an all-time high in India, when the heightened ‘love jihad’ campaign has vitiated inter-community romances, the insertion of a Hindu-Muslim love angle in slapstick fare is curious, especially because of its unsatisfactory resolution in the film. To me it seems like Bazmee & Co chickened out, fearing going the whole hog in these disturbing times, though I guess there could also be another interpretation. Without revealing details, let’s just say that the conclusion could, alternatively, perhaps be seen as a clever act of subversion that makes the point: you can put it off all you want, or pretend it is not happening, but it will and it is. I leave you to your own interpretation. Irrespective of its intended meaning, Nafisa’s final scene is awkwardly handled, hurriedly done and the worst part of this film. (Spoiler alert ends)

Be that as it may, and despite the considerable dip in pace in the second half, Bazmee has delivered to a great extent with Mubarakan. The film does not strain the viewer’s intellect too much yet does not demand that we – to quote a reviewer cliché – “leave our brains at home”.

At one point, Kartar has a chuckle at the expense of 60-year-old Anil Kapoor’s much-vaunted eternal youth, when he tells a group of youngsters: “Arrey main kehta hoon, goli maaron un buddhon ko. Baat aapas mein hi rakhte hain, yooouthh mein”? (I say, to hell with the oldies. Let’s keep this secret to ourselves, the youth.) The star is clearly allowing the film to laugh at him, just as Mubarakan is clearly mocking itself and its entire genre. This is intelligent silliness.

Rating (out of five stars): **3/4

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	156 minutes

Poster courtesy: IMDB