Following the success of ‘Dhamaal’ (2007) and ‘Double Dhamaal’ (2011) comes ‘Total Dhamaal’. With a stellar cast and previous success of the franchise, this film however fails to meet expectations: for a comedy film, there are hardly any moments where you feel like laughing out loud. The plot is simple enough. Rs 500 million has been stashed away in a zoo in a town called Janakpur (no, not the one in Nepal). This leads to a mad chase for the booty among a bunch of eccentric and greedy characters. Among them are badly-matched siblings, a bickering couple on the verge of a divorce, a conman, local goons, and a police commissioner. Their slapstick ride to get to the money first, complete with flying cars, falling bridges and crashing helicopters, is what the film is all about. Previous movies of the franchise were also about treasure hunts.
Who should watch it?
Fans of slapstick comedy could like, nay, even enjoy, Total Dhamaal. So might the old fans of Madhuri Dixit. Her pairing with Anil Kapoor is a nostalgia-filled walk down the memory lane.
This film packs in many intertwined sequences within 2h10m of runtime with ease. The rather simple plot also makes the story easy to follow, even though there are a welter of characters. The lavish songs and dance-numbers are also pleasing on the eye. Fans of comedy movies will get to see known faces in Bollywood like Arshad Warsi, Riteish Deshmukh, Javed Jaffrey, Sanjay Mishra and Johnny Lever, not to mention the famous Madhuri Dixit-Anil Kapoor combo who have made a comeback in this film.
But the movie could have been so much better given its great casting and a famous franchise name. Excess use of badly-executed computer graphics and predictability of punch lines are downers too. Dialogue delivery is sloppy, leading to poor comic timing, a problem compounded by equally bad editing.
Devgn, who has appeared in many hit comedies like the ‘Golmaal’ franchise, is a letdown. We have also seen better camaraderie between Javed Jaffrey and Arshad Warsi. The film does not do justice to their collective talent and performances they have delivered in earlier installments of the film. But Deshmukh does justice to his character of a conman. Though Johnny Lever gets far less screen-time, Deshmukh’s scene with him is hilarious.
Rest of the talent like Boman Irani and Esha Gupta are lost in half-heartedly written characters and poor dialogues. We are seeing Anil Kapoor and Madhuri Dixit together on-screen after a long time and this is the first mainstream comedy where they have acted together. As a quarrelsome couple, they make for a potent combo. But given their filmography of hits like ‘Ram Lakhan’, ‘Beta’ and ‘Tezaab’, these two deserved a better comeback.
The director of the film Indra Kumar has said in an interview that another film will be released under ‘Dhamaal’ franchise, to be called ‘Full-on Dhamaal’ or ‘Triple Dhamaal’. If only movies lived up to their names!.
Movie: Total Dhamaal
Director: Indra Kumar
Genre: Comedy/Action
Cast: Ajay Devgn, Madhuri Dixit, Anil Kapoor, Arshad Warsi
Rating: 2.5/5
