Bol Bachchan – Review

What is with this Rohit Shetty? First he took hold of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Gol maal title and made it into a money spinning franchisee. Atleast we can forgive him by asking what is in a name title?

This time though he makes a filmi harakiri in the name of paying homage to the Amol Palekar starrer Hrishikesh mukherjee’s 1979 classic Gol Maal. In this (mis) inspired movie, Ajay Devgn as the village feudal lord and pehlwan ‘Prithviraj Raghuvanshi’ who has an obsession with English and ends up muttering nonsensical phrases, the sole aim being a desperate attempt to make us laugh. Incidentally, he detests liars. It should be the only commonness with the original classic’s Utpal Dutt who reprised the role of an employer who is a man of traditional values, honest, principled but who hates irresponsible youth and especially men minus moustache. Bachchan Jr reprises the role of Amol Palekar while in the classic it is Ramprasad and Lakshmanprasad, here it is Abbas Ali and Abhishek Bachchan. So the plot follows the original and a comedy of errors follows allowing duplicity of characters due to spur of the moment lies and the need to justify it and ends up with what one can expect from Rohit Shetty – flying cars, footbal style kicks and flying men, singham Devgn and his facial close-ups and slo-mos and a ridiculously hanging-in-balance-on-cliff climax that we have seen many times before. Then we have the hapless Asin, who comes as  sister character of Bachchan Jr, who aimlessly and cluelessly makes appearances and in this Rohit Shetty’s scheme of ridiculous nonsense maximus resembles Pehlwan’s dead ex-gf and thus becomes his love-interest due the same reasoning. Prachi Desai gets to romance Abhishek Bachchan.

In between tolerating and occassionally LOL it out (that is the best we can say else would be a disgrace for the true meaning of laughing it out) at Ajay Devgn’s morbid english dialogues, what works partly is the effemiate act  by Abhishek Bachchan, who to his credit does it shamelessly enjoyable act. While Archana Pooransingh and Krishna Abhishek tries to enact a comedy circus into the movie.

Bol Bachchan is easily the weakest comedy circus amongst Rohit Shetty’s films.  If you are a gifted movie watcher who can instantly shut your brains and LOL at the shamelessly repeated mindless comedies Bollywood dishes out, go watch it. For the rest, you can wait and watch it on small screen when it is aired in a month or two.