Pagalpanti (2019) Review!!!

Synopsis – 3 men, considered as losers in their lives by the people, plan to get rich along with their girlfriends by fooling 2 gangsters and robbing their money.

My Take – While we are still reeling in the after effects of the massive commercial success of Housefull 4, here comes another no brainer comedy. However, what immediately raises expectations from this mad cap comedy is the fact that it is helmed by director Anees Bazmee.

He is, after all, the director who pushed Anil Kapoor and Nana Patekar into top goofy form in Welcome (2007) and Welcome Back (2015), brought a degree of freshness to the stereotyped boisterous Punjabi community in Singh Is Kinng (2008) and Mubarakan (2019), and made Salman Khan undoubtedly hilarious in No Entry (2005) and to some extend in Ready (2011). Most importantly, unlike most directors of the genre, his films have high repeat value.

His latest film too right from its promos promised about being another attempt where he goes all out with a multi-starrer cast and high production values, however, surprisingly the overall content ends up being below-par, severely so. As one would expect, the film does has some mad moments where you will really laugh from heart, but sadly these moments comes on rare occasions, and like every recent Bollywood comedy, the film goes on from being very funny to distasteful in a matter of seconds.

While I wouldn’t go as far to say that this is director Bazmee‘s worst film, I think that distinction severely goes to No Problem (2010), but it also doesn’t qualify as one of his better works either. Making this film a perfect example of what happens when writers gets a couple of good ideas in the middle of a creative drought and try to mash them together no matter the cause or effect.

The story follows Raj Kishore (John Abraham), an unlucky guy whose bad fate seems to follow him wherever he goes. When he starts a fire cracker business along with his friends Chandu (Pulkit Samrat) and Junky (Arshad Warsi), two brothers, it goes up in a matter of minutes. Deep in debt, and hoping to make better for the second time around, the trio dupe Sanjana (Ileana D’Cruz) and her uncle (Brijendra Kala) into investing in into their movers and packers business.

With their first order being a luxurious car delivery to the house of Raja Sahab (Saurabh Shukhla), an underworld don, and his brother in law Wifi Bhai (Anil Kapoor), as a gift for his daughter, Jhanvi (Kriti Kharbanda), on her birthday. As fate would have it, due the intervention of a heartbroken Sanjana and her goons, they end up delivering the car in a destroyed form, miffing the gangsters off.

However despite warnings off the bad fate the trio bring in, the underworld duo end up hiring them as servants of the house, against their wishes, as penance for the damage caused. What follows is a series of financial disasters, chases, exploding cars, love affairs, the escalation of Raja and Wi-Fi’s long-running feud with fellow gangsters Tulli (Zakir Hussain) and Bulli (Ashok Samarth), a run in with a supposed ghost named Kavya (Urvashi Rautela) and a new-found enmity with a billionaire crook called Niraj Modi (Inaamulhaq) who has cheated Indian banks of thousands of crores before fleeing the country.

The film is combo of all comedies because it is situational at some moments, it is humorous at some moments and it is also slapstick at many occasions. While doing this mixture, writers Rajiv Kaul, Praful Parekh and director Anees Bazmee fail to keep it engaging because every funny scene is followed by a set of flaws. If the rhythm had been kept intact then we might have witnessed one of the finest comedy of this decade. The film starts with illogical scenes but then it really makes you laugh with solid punchlines and situations that are turned into Fiasco.

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

However, it is hard to comprehend why director Bazmee chose to rehash so many elements from successful Hindi slapstick comedies of the past decade for this film.

For a start, the lead is chased by bad luck, just like Akshay Kumar‘s character in the first Housefull. Add to that a mansion housing a drop dead gorgeous female ghost in the form of Urvashi Rautela, who played a similar character in Great Grand Masti. And if stampeding camels wreaked havoc in the climax of Welcome Back, here that job falls on the shoulders of a trio of terrible CGI lions.

The screenplay does nothing to any of these tropes to elevate them to the level of tributes. Even the twist in the ghost’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 it’s treatment.

Additionally, the patriotic theme in the climax looks unnecessary when you are making such a mindless comedy. Just when it seemed like the film may be getting subversive and having a giggle at the expense of Bollywood’s hyper-nationalist brigade who have been churning out loud patriotic films in the past three years or so, they chicken out, and the scene ends tamely.

Performance wise, without a doubt it is Arshad Warsi who steals the show with his perfectly timed comic punches, followed closely by veterans Anil Kapoor and Saurabh Shukla, who manage to extract some laughs in the film’s best moments. Years of facing the camera have given John Abraham a certain comfort with the genre which is on full display here, and manages to get the best out of his lead role.

Pulkit Samrat, a young actor still awaiting his due, also brings in his best. While the gorgeous ladies, Ileana D’Cruz, Kriti Kharbanda and Urvashi Rautela, don’t have much to do, they manage to leave a mark. Inaamulhaq, brings in yet another earnest performance, while Bijendra Kala, Zakir Hussain, Manoj Tiwari, and Ashok Samarth are fine. On the whole, ‘Pagalpanti’ is a below average comedy which doesn’t deliver on its expected entertainment quotient.