Golmaal Again

Casting: Ajay Devgn, Parineeti Chopra, Tabu, Arshad Warsi, Tusshar Kapoor, Shreyas Talpade, Prakash Raj, Neil Nitin Mukesh

Rated: 3/10

Rohit Shetty may care two hoots about opinion on his films and the cast he has assembled for the fourth edition of the Golmaal series may be equally irreverent, but fact is that despite some cool but infrequent one-liners, the film screams the place down with such mediocre nonsense that you feel that Shetty has lost the script.

Of course being comprehensively over the top is the DNA of Golmaal and, of course, it is meant to be larger than the biggest buffoon you thought existed on tape, but No 4 is flat, screechy and too fixated on bhootyapa as Talpade says with deliberate intent to make you take notice of the proceedings in this mindless drama which will haunt for a long time after the night is over.

The scene shifts from Goa to the sylvan tea estates of a never-before so well showcased and green Ooty and both the ladies in the film — Parineeti and Tabu — get meatier role than women in Shettynamas. The orphanage looks like a Yale or Harvard campus and the orphans are incidental in a film going nuts with Devgn’s night fears and a bloated Arshad Warsi’s mean tricks. Yes, there is ooh-aa-pa (hope you get it) by Tusshar Kapoor and yo-o’s by Kunal Khemu and, of course, the all-fangs-bared sarp baba Vrijesh Hirjee but despite them, there is not much to laugh about in a film where Johnny lever lives his old days and Sanjay Mishra does the most interesting but short role of an OTT goonster. Prakash Raj and Neil Nitin Mukesh are thrown in for the turn in the tale though both are washouts with Raj trying to do a Singham comic act, albeit with a twist.

The haunted comedy that Shetty plays out seems be to based on his basic premise that the Indian gentry is so lusting for laughter that any kind of comic act would do well to get the cash registers ringing. The guffaws all around the hall seconds this premise. The movie will do well, maybe not as well as the first three and that tells us amply how the slide from the original is constant. All said, hopefully Shetty will agree that even not-stop nonsense needs some standard. Golmaal Returns has none. High-5 for next time, then.