Phata Poster Nikhla Hero

A good percentage of Rajkumar Santoshi’s latest comedy Phata Poster Nikhla Hero looks like a spoof of the 80’s mother son drama. But the fact that they were serious about those lame melodramas and sentiments makes the movie irritating. It’s not that you won’t laugh seeing those typical Santoshi humors, but it’s this confused mix-up of emotional bonding and no brainer humor that takes the movie into no man’s land.

The story has young Vishwas Rao who aspires to become an actor in Bollywood. But his mother has dreams of seeing her son as the servant of the law and as per her demand he goes to Mumbai to attend the police interview. With some accidental twists and turns people starts to believe that Vishwas is an actual cop and Vishwas’s mother decides to visit her son who is in the news for his gutsy acts. The drama’s that unfolds as Vishwas tries to play a drama to keep his mother happy while the badies react to the deeds of Vishwas is what this slap stick comedy trying to narrate.

From the first scene itself director sends out the warning that it’s going to be an uneven mix of ethics and nonsense. And till the last scene, the movie maintains that consistency by including some nonsense humor and some dramatic acts of the old Bollywood movies. All those incidents in the screenplay are never really helping the movie to move forward in any manner and they just offer some amount of skit fun which you may forget after five minutes. The placing of humor was really awkward like the Vinod Khanna joke which came after that clichéd flash back sequence we were expecting. An uninteresting cameo by Salman Khan is also there to make you curious.

Rajkumar Santoshi can’t really crack something fresh in terms of content or treatment. The jokes aren’t that great to be remembered. The characters are too stereo typed. Screenplay is predictable and dull. I don’t know what Ileana’s character was doing in the whole movie. Absolutely wasted role. Shahid’s character is on that chocolate image until someone touches his mother and he goes Dabangg with all those dusty rope filled fight sequences. Fights aren’t that great and the editor has tried his best to make it look better. None of the songs are placed correctly and in fact almost all of them featuring Shahid and Ileana were unnecessary. Cinematography is just about ok.

For me the only positives of the movie were in the performance section. You can blame Shahid for choosing the film, but considering the nature or the way this character was written I think he has done a fair job. Ileana wasn’t that pleasing. Padmini Kolhapure is just about convincing as that overreacting mother. Darshan Jariwala was good in his shoes. The actors who really gave me something to laugh were Saurabh Shukla and Sanjai Mishra. Both of them added that extra something to their character which the other actors couldn’t do.

Overall, Phata Poster Nikhla hero disappoints.  As I said, you will definitely laugh at some points but it can’t provide that pleasure of revisiting a good joke and laughing over it when you reach home. My rating is 2/5 for this “fun” film.