Thank God from director Indra Kumar is a wannabe, feel-good movie with no plans to look fresh. Starring Ajay Devgn and Sidharth Malhotra in major roles, Thank God is a lazily written greenscreen comedy that had the scope to walk away from the template but chose to play it safe by having skit-level jokes.
Ayaan Kapoor is a real estate broker who is going through a tough phase in his business. His wife Ruhi is a police officer, and her earnings currently support the family. One day while going for a business deal, Ayaan met with a car crash, and his condition was bad. In that state, he wakes up in heaven and has to play The Game of Life, organized by Chitragupt, aka CG, in order to live. How he plays that game is the story of Thank God.
The premise isn’t that alien to most of us as it has been discussed in movies like Bruce Almighty, which was remade in Hindi as God Tussi Great Ho, and also the Malayalam film James & Alice. While James & Alice was a very sentimental take, Bruce Almighty was a Jim Carrey show. Indra Kumar’s version, which is an official adaptation of the Danish film Sorte Kugler, is a very loud and preachy comedy. The caricature-type characters have zero depth, and the Kapil Sharma show-like humor makes it even more formulaic.
As Chitragupt, aka CG, Ajay Devgn got a really easy character that demanded his charm as a star rather than his acting chops. And he did that part very neatly. The real challenge here was for Sidharth Malhotra. There is definitely scope for performance. But humor is something that Sidharth hasn’t really proved his metal, and one can clearly see him struggling to get the pitch of the comedy. There were places where I felt a Ritesh Deshmukh or a Rajukummar Rao would have been a much better choice for a role like this. Rakul Preet Singh, as Ruhi, gets a very forgettable wife character.
Indra Kumar is not someone who is known for subtle filmmaking. The Masti franchise maker has made a movie that stitches together a series of funny sequences. In the film, Seema Pahwa’s mother character asks Ayaan whether he forwarded the good morning message to 11 people as she instructed. The guy who sat in front of me was jumping from the seat as he laughed at that line, and if you are someone who still finds those jokes fresh, I guess you belong to the target audience of Thank God. A majority of this movie’s shots have visual effects, and surprisingly the quality of the visual effects was better than the Adipurush teaser and Ram Setu movie. I don’t think criticizing Tanishk Bagchi, and Rochak Kohli is going to make any changes to the T-Series’ way of looking at the music of their movies.
Even though it isn’t a comedy that achieves anything unique, I must say that it was never a patience tester. Thank God flows easily through its familiar and predictable path and becomes that message-oriented comedy package that will make you giggle occasionally, but you will forget almost instantly.
Thank God flows easily through its familiar and predictable path and becomes that message-oriented comedy package that will make you giggle occasionally, but you will forget almost instantly.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
