Total Dhamaal Review - A Reel of Actors Having Simultaneous Mid-Life Crises.

Total Dhamaal is an odd film. It’s a rung above director Indra Kumar’s niche - blatantly sexist sex comedies - you’ll remember the Masti franchise. But, it’s still below Rohit Shetty’s oeuvre, though in places, as the cars blow up and fly in the sky, the lines do admittedly blur. This is a Cartoon Network level film, but instead of two dimensional comic characters, we have living cinema legends Madhuri Dixit, Anil Kapoor, Ajay Devgn, Boman Irani and many others completely tarnishing their name. This is a nothing film. The plot is as follows.

Fifty crores have been stashed in a zoo in Janakpur. We have ten people chasing after this cash prize, so they can improve their situations. Well, I thought to myself, at least someone gets something out of this. There’s Avinash and Bindu, a crabby Gujarati couple, played by Madhuri Dixit and Anil Kapoor, on the cusp of a divorce. Then, there’s Guddu, played by Ajay Devgn and his ‘sidekick’ Jonny (Sanjay Mishra). You’ll remember Sanjay as the only good part of Golmaal Again, which also starred Devgn. Here, he’s a bro-spewing mess, reminiscent of Daisy Shah and Saqib Saleem from Remo D’Souza train-wreck third instalment to the Race franchise.

There’s also the supremely hammy Riteish Deshmukh as this corrupt firefighter, as if there were such a thing, called Lallan. He and his sidekick, Jhingur, played by a constantly trembling Pitobash Tripathy, seem like they were going for Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur, but ended up halfway there, having ingested some reruns of Tom & Jerry. And then there’s Boman Irani, as this constantly perplexed Police Commissioner who opens his mouth as if he’s a baby begging to be fed, a lot. Topping off this cast are phenomenal actors Arshad Warsi and Javed Jaffrey, here reduced to bickering man-children, one who even wears suspenders with minions drawn all over it.

Squashing their talent is Indra, who is happy with B-grade humour that I can’t see appeasing anyone above the age of 5. It is so mediocre and terrible as a film, that it actually makes you cringe. Cringe that Madhuri Dixit once did Devdas, Ajay Devgn once did Raincoat, Anil Kapoor recently did Dil Dhadakne Do and Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga and all the other actors on this bargain-base ensemble, have now become flagbearers of mediocre cinema.

Total Dhamaal just drained the life out of me, because its ultimate blunder is that it just squashes any memories you have of this stellar cast. Take Ajay for that matter - a fine actor, who once did Singham, then a Raincoat, and even Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam. Recently though, he’s done Golmaal Again, Shivaay and Baadshaho - some of the most awful films that come to mind in recent years. What compels people or studio houses, especially those that backed Sanju and Ek Ladki Ko Dekha in the last year alone, to make godawful cinema like this baffles me.

I know I’m droning on, but here, there’s nothing to ‘review’. Indra doesn’t give us that much. The acting, each and every single word, is absolutely horrible. Anil, Madhuri, Ajay and Javed are overly comical. Boman Irani plays virtually every single villain he’s played in every comedy film, ever. Arshad Warsi just keeps on saying, ‘shit, shit, shit’, so much so that the six year olds in the audience started screaming the dialogue in unison. The cinematography by Keiko Nakahara is nicely done.

The frames are too loud, though. The film is overly saturated so that each bright colour pops even more. Sonakshi Sinha, in this awfully regressive rehash of Mungda, is glowing because the screen is that bright. Can you believe that four people wrote this excuse of a film? There was Ved Prakash, Paritosh Painter and Bunty Rathore on screenplay. And Indra on story. Between the four of them, they can’t come up with a single good joke. But, because this is a Bollywood slapstick comedy, it offends almost everybody.

It appropriates women to maids working in the kitchen, is overly racist towards South Indians, on multiple occasions, actually. In fact, every time that Anil’s misogynistic Avinash opens his mouth, it’s always something awful about women. In this fourty-five second dialogue in the beginning of the film, reminiscent of the Pyaar Ka Punchnama monologue, Indra virtually offends every single woman, spits on MeToo and upholds the male conscience. Which is especially problematic because of the section of audience this excuse of a film caters to.

There’s nothing in Total Dhamaal. Even your children will get tired of this god-awful film. Save yourself the time and money. It has awful CGI, terrible gags, actors who look like they’re on drugs, while simultaneously having mid-life crises.

Dhamaal may be coming in, but I hope the love doesn’t.