The latest Netflix original, Toaster, starring Rajkummar Rao, is his home production. And looking at the stretched-out nature of the comedy script with far too many cameos and unremarkable twists, the movie, on the whole, gives you the vibe of a lazy effort. Toaster wants to present itself as a situational comedy that escalates into something huge in a funny manner. But after a point, every twist in the tale starts to feel too exaggerated, almost desperately asking for the laughter from the audience. The humor through performance will make you giggle occasionally. However, the overall quality of the writing of this movie is extremely dodgy.
Ramakant and his wife Shilpa, are living in this apartment complex for rent. Ramakant, who runs a perfume shop, is a miser. At one point, when Shilpa’s martial arts teacher’s daughter got married, Ramakant had to spend a good amount of money to buy a toaster as a present. When he knew that the wedding was canceled because of some unfortunate reasons, the miser in him wanted to get the toaster back. How his efforts to get it back drag him into larger problems is what we see in Toaster.
The idea of making a toaster a central character is indeed interesting, and during lockdown, we have seen some interesting comedies like the Kunal Khemu starrer Loot Case, which explored a similar zone. The problem with this movie is that it may have set the toaster as its focus point, but the writing lacks imagination in building something exciting around it. In the initial parts of the movie, one might feel that they could pull off a catchy confusion-comedy with multiple tracks. But almost 40-odd minutes into the movie, a major character reveal happens, and post that, the movie struggles to be funny. Everything that happens with characters like Guddu Bhaiyya or the inspector character does not create any major spike in the story.
Vivek Daschaudary, who has directed the movie, is unable to present things refreshingly. The blocking of scenes or the lighting styles are all trying to amplify the comedic aspect of the movie. And those visual patterns are somewhat familiar to the audience. And frankly, for a movie like this, treatment is secondary. The written content has to be exciting to keep us hooked onto the content, and the movie fails in that aspect at an early stage. They are hoping for chaos in the narrative by making the wife character a beta CID and entangling the main track with another one featuring a politician. But none of it can create that much-needed laugh-out-loud moment.
Rajkummar Rao as Ramakant is pretty much playing a derivative of almost all the comical heroes he has played in his career. The movie lies entirely on his shoulders, and it is he who makes this comedy less dull with his performance. But even he has to resort to familiar tropes to keep things engaging. Sanya Malhotra as the wife character, Shilpa, was fine. Archana Puan Singh gets to do this peculiar role of an aunty in the neighborhood, and I must say the casting itself gives away too much. Upendra Limaye repeats his comical rugged style in this movie as well.
Rajkummar Rao has managed to squeeze in multiple cameos into this movie, and most of them are with his long-time collaborators in the industry. I am saying this because these cameos somewhere felt like a desperate and deliberate attempt to add some fun moments to a movie that is otherwise struggling to find some high points that can be considered refreshingly funny. Toaster is one more to the list of underwhelming Hindi original films from Netflix that you can watch only while you are munching.
