Golmaal Again

If your idea of entertaining cinema is slapstick jokes that won’t stay in your head after you leave the theater, Golmaal Again from Rohit Shetty is exactly the kind of movie you should watch. Golmaal franchise which now seems like the NREGS equivalent for actors like Arshad Warsi, Kunal Khemu, Shreyas Talpade and Tushar Kapoor, this time also comes with a story that looks juvenile in nature. The occasional jokes and spoofing may make you giggle, but Golmaal Again is depending too much on that.

This time the story plants our five friends as orphans who got raised in an orphanage in Ootty. All of them left the orphanage at one point and in the present day when they got the news that the person who ran that orphanage passed away, they decided to pay a visit to the place. That visit and how some unplanned events change the course of their lives is what Golmaal Again all about.

The Kakkakuyil inspired first Golmaal movie was actually a funny one as it had humor that went with the story of the movie. But after that the movies in this franchise went for fun by concentrating just on the humor. The Sajid Farhad punch lines had no longevity.  In fact Rohit Shetty himself admitted that Golmaal 2 was a trashy film. What actually made me laugh was the fact that Rohit Shetty in a recent interview said that it took 7 years for them to make another Golmaal movie because they weren’t getting that right script. And I am like “and this is what you have come up after investing 7 years?” At a time when lack of fresh content is causing serious problems for films, Shetty and his team seems to be in no mood for reinventing.

The franchise is such that every actor is playing a caricaturized version of a normal character. As usual Ajay Devgn is the hero face of the film and he doesn’t really have much of a challenge here in terms of acting. Shreyas Talpade and Arshad Warsi are the two actors in the main gang who manages to crack the comedy nicely. Kunal Khemu is still trying to be in the league and Tushar Kapoor is just there to take a break from sex comedies. I thought Parineeti Chopra will have more screen time than Tabu and what happened was the opposite. And both these female actors have got forgettable roles. My favorite in the whole franchise is Mr. Sanjay Mishra and he is there in this film too. Johny Lever plays an annoying irrelevant character in the film. Prakash Raj goes back to playing comical villain and there is Neil Nithin Mukesh whose look is enough for the film.

There is no point in looking for logic in Rohit Shetty films. A movie like Golmaal Again is only intended to make the audience laugh. But when you use cinema as a medium, it can be more coherent. Bollywood has classic examples like Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, Andaz Apna Apna etc. which made the nonsensical humor look so flawless. But the dialogue driven humor of Golmaal Again reduces that fun. Slapstick episodes in the screenplay aren’t adding up to the narrative. The ghost element and revenge is a used out idea and it was only the humor that would have made this movie engaging and that wasn’t really happening. In the color splashy, film set like world of Rohit Shetty cinematographer Jomon T John is struggling to do something creatively. Occasionally the imagery has this Harry Potter kind of feel. Music isn’t that great.

Golmaal Again is just a bundle of rhyming dialogue jokes that occasionally works. While I sit and write this review, the only thing that comes to my head is that Father Figure joke as it has been a part of the film’s promos for a long while.

Rating: 1.5/5