Review: Total Dhamaal blurs the line between human and animal existence

Animals can understand Hindi as well—or so Total Dhamaal would have us believe. “Kaise ho chacha?” Riteish Deshmukh enquires of a gorilla after just having chomped on his hand, a few moments before a female elephant is addressed as ‘aunty’ and a rampaging lion is referred to as ‘Seth Ji’. Any impending prospect of endangerment might well be the least of their concerns. Indra Kumar’s film is a strange beast unto itself, the latest instalment in a preposterously awful franchise where issue is rhymed with tissue (and, for that matter, sixth sense with nonsense) in an attempt to elicit non-existent laughs. It’s the “wildest adventure ever”, we’re told, and the sheer presumption of that statement is galling: iambic has never been this moronic.

Ajay Devgn’s character isn’t averse to eating bougainvilleas. He takes the ‘slap’ in ‘slapstick’ a little too seriously, and so we see character after character learn what it means to be on the wrong end of his palm. If there’s one thing in this film that has more holes than the script, it is Devgn’s jeans themselves, and the actor spends a significant portion of the film saying things like “yeh action ka time hai, reaction ka nahi”—this when he’s not busy taking selfies with a lion. He’s Singham, nudge-nudge wink-wink. We’re supposed to laugh.

Sanjay Mishra—the same marvellous actor who made us weep during Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan—is reduced to crawling on a train track. “Aaj kal GPS in hai,” he tells Devgn, reminding us all that there are few things cooler than a geopositioning system that is capable of conversing not only in English and Hindi but also in—um—Chindi. Mishra repeatedly refers to his partner in crime as ‘bro’—as bad a sign as any for those of us who were unfortunate enough to watch a certain Remo D’Souza film last year—and makes up for his occasional lapses into silence by landing a kiss on Devgn’s cheek. Ankhon ne Dekha hai, all right, and it’s not a pretty sight.

The rest are strictly unmemorable as well. Boman Irani finds himself dangling upside down from a building with his boxers in plain view, Ritesh Deshmukh stamps on an elderly lady’s foot, Madhuri Dixit refers her on-screen husband to a veterinary doctor, Manoj Pahwa crashes a plane, Anil Kapoor refers to himself as a wannabe Dhirubhai Ambani, Arshad Warsi gets vomited upon by an elephant and then cleansed by the same creature (it’s complementary dry cleaning, we’re told), Johnny Lever compares Deepika Padukone to a helicopter, and Javed Jaffrey licks a lollipop after getting his posterior bitten by a vulture. As for the ‘special appearances’ by both Sonakshi Sinha and Esha Gupta, well, the less said, the better.

At one point, Arshad’s character finds himself sinking in quicksand even as an almost bemused snake looks on. The subtext here might be unintended, but it’s recognizable nonetheless: when surrounded by commercial vipers, it’s glub-glub all the way. “It’s all about the money,” we’re repeatedly reminded during the film’s opening sequence, with each character taking turns to painstakingly emphasize how a gulaabi note (or two) can make all the difference in the world. “Money da swag super, koyi na isse upar.” Talk about transparency.

Either way, this is a steaming pile of execrable bilge: one where an art gallery gets repurposed as a ‘fart gallery’, a ‘Madraasi’ character mumbles gibberish while sipping from a coconut, a petite-looking woman is referred to as a ‘Jungli billi’, and a man is referred to as ‘Jayasuriya’ if he happens to be short, dark-skinned and bald. Heck, even Game of Thrones isn’t spared: in one sequence, Ramin Djawadi’s glorious Winterfell theme is shamelessly appropriated, note after breathtaking note. Sigh. Don’t defile that which must not be defiled.

Reportedly inspired by Stanley Kramer’s “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”, Total Dhamaal is a bad, bad, bad, bad film: a two-hour long monstrosity that ought to have been pruned by, well, two hours. The most accomplished performance here is by a capuchin, and this—suitably enough for a monkey named Crystal—should make things clear. It’s a cinematic wasteland, all right, and Indra Kumar’s strange predilection for all things jungli has ensured that this time, he’s managed to offend gorillas as well. One might call it a Forest Dump.

Rating: 1 out of 5

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Shreehari H. is a lover of films and an even greater lover of writing.