Hungama 2

If any of you have ever wondered how much actors elevates a scene that is already written, then I would say Hungama 2 is a great tool to understand that. Hungama 2, the latest movie by director Priyadarshan, is a remake of his own classic film Minnaram with an altered climax that falls in the typical Priyadarshan zone. Almost 80% of the film is a scene-by-scene remake, and you can clearly witness how mediocre performances can make a movie unbelievably dull. While the original had a solid emotional core, here, everything is about being slapstick.

Aakash Kapoor is the son of Colonel Gobind Kapoor, and he is all set to marry the daughter of their family friend Mr. Bajaj. But suddenly, out of nowhere, Vaani, Aakash’s college girlfriend, arrives at his home with a kid and claims that Aakash is the father of the child. Aakash tries to convince everyone that he is not the father, but nobody believes him. With the wedding just around the corner, how Aakash and his family handle this unprecedented situation is what we witness in this Minnaram remake.

Improvising and restructuring a story that was written almost two decades ago is not a bad thing to do. But the problem I felt with Hungama 2 is that the makers are trying to treat it as a no-brainer comedy. Yes, the initial jokes in Minnaram also had these slapstick elements in them. But those sequences had an organic feel to their credit, and now I realize how much the acting part made those sequences hilarious and memorable. The scenes in Hungama 2 are lifeless. While someone like Mohanlal portrayed the tension of the hero so believably and hilariously, Meezaan Jaffrey’s portrayal of the same character felt like an amateur mimicry of Ranbir Kapoor. The logic less climax was just like adding insult to injury.

Meezaan Jaffrey is struggling to have some grace in his performance. One could see the fakeness in his expressions in some tricky sequences at the very beginning itself. The character is in an extremely screwed-up situation, and Jaffrey’s performance hardly conveys that condition. Pranitha Subhash is no different in terms of making us feel for her character. Shilpa Shetty’s character is stretched out unnecessarily, only to include certain kinky jokes and a song remake. Paresh Rawal is unbearable. The only guy who managed to deliver a quality performance was Ashutosh Rana. And I found Rajpal Yadav hilarious in that scene where he is asked the name of the child.

Priyadarshan seems to have lost the enthusiasm for creating comedy. The staging of scenes doesn’t have that old charm, and in Hungama 2, he is insulting his vintage self. Some of the songs are too different from the tone of the original and had no sync with the progression of the story. The screenplay follows the same structure, but you have several irrelevant new scenes that are just there for the sake of comedy. The new climax is Priyadarshan trying to create his usual confusion climax, which usually becomes a laugh riot, but in this case, it was flat out boring and dull. NK Ekambaram’s cinematography focuses only on making the scenes glossy, and I wonder why the introduction scene of Akshay Khanna had the camera moving like an online ping pong game.

Even if you haven’t seen Minnaram, you shouldn’t watch Hungama 2. The performances are so bad that the humor falls flat. The original one that had tragic emotions at the end is tweaked here, and this happy ending version will actually make you sad for all the wrong reasons. Minnaram is available for free in the same Hotstar that asks for a VIP subscription to watch Hungama 2.