Raaj Shaandilyaa, who made his directorial debut back in 2019 with the Ayushmann Khurrana starrer Dream Girl, had served as the writer for the Comedy Circus show for a long time. The reason why I am mentioning this in the review of his latest film, Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video, is because Shaandilyaa has a knack for packing some rhyming witty lines in his stories, and like his other films, Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video also manages to be funny occasionally due to those lines. But the writing in terms of story development is extremely lazy, and by the time the film reaches climax and we hear Vicky giving a lecture about the dark side of hidden cam videos, you almost want Mukesh Tiwari to become Vasooli Bhai and say, “Abey Jaldi Bol Kal Subah Panvel Nikalna Hei.”
So the story is set in 1997 and our main man Vicky, who was in love with a doctor named Vidya, eventually gets married to her, thanks to a series of convenient stupidity. So, while they were in Goa celebrating their honeymoon, Vicky had the idea of videotaping their time together. When they came back, Vicky had that video recorded on a CD, and while it was there in the CD player, the whole player and several other stuff from the house got stolen. Now Vicky had this enormous task of finding the CD without really telling anyone why he wanted that CD so badly. How he does that and what happens in that journey is what is in the movie Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video.
So when the movie’s trailer was released, there was a striking similarity in terms of the theme with the recently released Malayalam film Nunakkuzhi. In both movies, the heroes are trying to solve the mess they created because of their kink. The major difference was the fact that Shaandilyaa’s film was set in the late ’90s. But while a movie like Nunakkuzhi had the support of a very tight screenplay, which had only moments relevant to the plot, Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video feels like a compilation of laughter gags. It’s like Raaj Shaandilyaa has written the scene’s purpose in one word and then decides to bombard it with his skit-writing sensibilities.
The movie begins with this whole sequence that has Vicky “smartly” convincing Vidhya’s parents why he is a good contender to be his son-in-law. I can accept it as this David Dhawan-style slapstick comedy. But the writing just stretches every scene with this dialogue humor. It’s like Shaandilyaa thinks giving a two-and-a-half-hour-long version of a comedy circus to the audience and labeling it as a movie would work for them. The last hour of the film feels like a salvaging operation. The writing runs out of ideas, and Shaandilyaa tries to save the movie by adding a spoof of Rajkummar Rao’s biggest success, Stree, and it is just not working.
After that, the movie decides to confront the villain, and as I mentioned in the beginning, the rhetoric of the hero and other characters, which just doesn’t sync with the tone of the rest of the cinema, just goes on and on. Since T-Series are the coproducers of the film, we have the usual recreation of old classics, and the song placements and the quality of the recreated songs were just forgettable.
Rajkummar Rao, as we all know, is a great performer, and when it comes to comedy, he has a great flow in presenting the heartland characters. Here also, from a performance point of view, Rajkummar is able to shoulder the movie. Tripti Dimri, as Vidya, is mostly in that angry mode. It is not a mere eye candy character, and she has managed to crack the humor portions convincingly. Tiku Talsania, as the grandfather of Vicky, was hilarious. The cop role of Vijay Raaz, where he is paired opposite Mallika Sherawat, is funny occasionally. But mostly, both characters are used just for the sake of some gags, and some of them are racist too. Rakesh Bedi, Archana Puran Singh, and Mukesh Tiwari are the other major names in the long cast of this film.
A day after the movie’s release, Raaj Shaandilyaa released an apology letter to the producers of Stree for using the Stree character in this movie. In the apology note, they mentioned that by Tuesday, they will make the necessary changes and remove all the Stree references. It will be interesting to see how they are going to do this damage control. The Stree chapter has a significant space in the movie, and it is used to depict a key moment in the story. It will either make the film look nonsensical, which it already is to an extent. Or it will make it clear to the audience that many of the scenes in this movie can be chopped off easily, and it won’t affect the main narrative at all.
It's like Shaandilyaa thinks giving a two-and-a-half-hour-long version of a comedy circus to the audience and labeling it as a movie would work for them.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
