Dhamaal
is the latest in a series of leave you brains
behind and enjoy the ride kind of sesneless comedy
like No Entry, Masti, Partner
and Heyy Babyy that has found favour
with audiences. It is likely that a section of
the sudience will go along for the ride and find
Dhamaal funny as well, but the film though
having its odd moment is really loud, inane and
totally unfunny.
The film is directed by Indra Kumar who following
the failures of his melodramas Aashiq,
Mann and Rishtey switched to
comedy and tasted some success with Masti
and to a smaller extent Pyare Mohan.
So he continues with comedy while the going is
good. Dhamaal thas a wafer thin plot
of a dying man (Prem Chopra) telling 4 good-for-nothing
friends where in Goa he's stashed away 10 crore
rupees. The four friends fight over how the money
is to be divided and so go their own way trying
to reach Goa any which way they can and get all
the loot for themselves. Add to this a disgruntled
cop, who has been chasing the dead man for 10
years and who on becoming fed up with honesty
getting him nowhere in the the police force, decides
to go for the money as well...
 The
problem with the film, having shades of It'a
a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, is that it is nothing
but a series of gags and it runs out of steam
well, well before the end. A few of the moments
are admittedly funny and yes, even some of the
oneliners are undoubtedly witty. To be fair, Indra
Kumar has tried to make a good, clean comedy and
has tried to stick to the basic storyline. The
fight at the dhaba cutting to its signboard works
well and is perhaps the best treated sequence
in the film. But the film works just sporadically
as unfortunately practically all of the film is
much, much too loud and noisy and you also get
a feeling of déjà vu with most of
the gags - that you have seen them somewhere before
be it Austin Powers or Road Trip.
The hanging on a tree at the side of a mountain
too is straight out of Beetle Bailey
and No Entry. Not only that, the gags
just go on and on and on, finally telling on both
the pace of the film and the effectiveness of
the gag. In particular the sequence of the air
traffic controller, played by Vijay Raaz is potentially
really funny but ultimately falls totally flat
as it is stretched unnecessarily. Or even the
sequence with Riteish in the bus with the dacoit,
played by Sanjay Mishra which is plain looong
and unfunny... In fac,t there are several sequences
that are are quite unfunny and taxing on your
nerves and for all its loudness and lack of any
subtlety whatsover, the film still lacks energy.
A film like this depends almost entirely on the
ability of the actors and what they are able to
make of the script. In this regard, the performances
are a mixed bag. Riteish Deshmukh once again is
natural and shows his sense of fine comic timing
but he is now getting typecast in such roles and
has to go beyond playing goofy characters. He
is very good in the scene where he does a take
off on Sanjeev
Kumar. Jaaved Jaffrey has the author-backed
role of the naive, slow, dimwit who inadvertently
causes the quartet all sorts of problems and though
the role is overplayed, he nevertheless succeeds
in repeatedly getting the laughs. However, Arshad
Warsi seems surprisingly listless and flat and
even looks disinterested. Maybe because his role
is also the weakest of the four while Ashish Choudhury
just makes faces in the name of comedy. Sanjay
Dutt just about adequately goes through the motions
while Asrani though funny in places is again,
like the film, too loud. Vijay Raaz is fine as
the deadpan air traffic controller but he is undone
with the makers not knowing when to end a good
thing and stretching his scene beyond what one
can endure.
Technically there is not much to say at all.
The shot taking and camerawork looks terribly
dated like the films of the 1980s with some extremely
tacky use of the zoom lens, starting right from
the first shot of the film. The editing needed
to be far, far crisper as many of the scenes go
on and on, outliving their usefulness. The music
by Adnan Sami is so-so and the song picturizations
too are just about strictly ok and do nothing
for the film.
All in all, the film is average in its better
moments and painful and unfunny otherwise.
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