Of late, Dhyan Sreenivasan movies are being promoted similarly to the advertisement for firecrackers. Even in the promotions, the cast and crew of this movie are indirectly telling us how entertaining this movie will be when any YouTube channel decides to roast it. Aap Kaise Ho, the latest Dhyan Sreenivasan starrer, a film written by the actor, feels like an example of insensitivity towards the medium of cinema. With the basic idea of the film never leaving the basic zone, Aap Kaise Ho is the kind of film that made me feel that 2X speed options inside theaters won’t be such a bad idea.
Christy, our hero, is about to get married to his long-time girlfriend, and a week before the wedding, he decides to give a party to his close friends. With the consent of his girlfriend, Christy gave a great party to his friends, but once they all got drunk, foolish decisions were made, and the fun night led to a lot of problems. What we see in Aap Kaise Ho are those problems.
We have seen movies about people who are frivolous. And we have seen movies being made in a frivolous manner. Aap Kaise Ho combines these two aspects to create a film that feels like a scam against which we can’t even file a case. The situations and dialogues in the first half of the movie are your typical men being bitchy about their partners’ thing, and you have dialogues that echo the kind of humor you see in TV channel skits. After showing smoke, drinks, and girls, the movie decides to go to the key event in the story. But there also it is dragging a simple conflict by pampering it with dialogue humor.
In any movie that takes an effort to create a proper conflict, what happens in the second half of Aap Kaise Ho would have felt like an intense chapter where the hero is dealing with a delicate, helpless situation. But in the case of Aap Kaise Ho, you don’t need to stress much to know that Dhyan Sreenivasan was probably developing this movie while they were shooting it. Songs are popping up with no notice, and the amount of irrelevant footage in this movie is really high, considering it has a run time of only one hour and 45 minutes.
Dhyan Sreenivasan, in his own script, plays this “Nanmaniranjavan Sreenivasan” character who has a knack for maintaining top-notch idiots as friends. To maintain naivety, he follows this restrained body language, which really looks fake on screen. Jeeva and Divyadarshan’s characters are supposed to be annoying, and they double ensure that factor by delivering a performance that is equally annoying. Ramesh Pisharody, who comes in the second half of the movie, gets to score in certain scenes. But the overdependence on his spontaneous humor is pretty much exposing the lack of content on a writing level. Aju Varghese, as this corrupt police officer, felt rugged in some frames, but again, the overdoing and stretching of the script ruined that performance as well. Every actor who decided to pay a visit to the sets of this movie was offered a role, and I felt really bad for actors like Abin Bino and Navas Vallikkunnu, who got roles that felt like an insult to their talent.
Aap Kaise Ho feels like a movie they decided to release midway in post-production. When the characters played by Dhyan, Jeeva, and Divyadarshan are shown for the first time, the screen froze for a second, and I am guessing director Vinay Jose’s idea was to write the names of the characters on screen. Maybe due to Dhyan’s understanding of the movie’s box office performance, they decided not to do that to cut the cost of the graphics. Or it is possible that the entire team forgot about it, as nobody associated with the movie seems to be excited. It takes a special kind of audacity to create a film as arrogant as Aap Kaise Ho at a time when footfalls are really low.
It takes a special kind of audacity to create a film as arrogant as Aap Kaise Ho at a time when footfalls are really low.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
