Chor Machaye Shor Hindi Movie
William Shakespeare had said "that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet". The adage can be aptly used to describe David Dhawan's latest film Chor Machaaye Shor - for it is just another film from his farce factory.
The film is rowdy and has a pack of bratty characters exerting their energy so hard on the screen that one fears for their health.
But this is Dhawan's only comedy where no character gets serious or maudlin even for a second. Everyone wants the diamond - which looks like a crystal paperweight - and not because mom is dying, dad is drunk and sister is a dowry victim.
Bobby Deol, as the diamond thief Ram and his phantom twin Shyam, is allowed to get away with the dare devil heist in front of two senior law enforcers -- Paresh Rawal and Om Puri -- who behave more like clowns.
Everyone is on the run and they all seem to be having a lot of fun.
Unfortunately the riotous onscreen revelry does not translate into wild laughter and the audience's pleasure from the situational humour.
The film doesn't lack comic talent. Rawal and Puri -- as police officers constantly at loggerheads over the issue of double identities -- are funny.
But TV star Shekhar Suman's bosom-heaving masquerades tend to make the proceedings drag -- in more ways than one.
The sequence where Suman dancing to an Umraojaan song, thrusts his padded bosoms into Om Puri's face while the latter gives him tit-for-tat, or the highly embarrassing sequence in which Puri and Rawal sneak into the bedroom of Bobby's mother -- Suman in drag again -- are in shockingly bad taste.
Puri and Rawail have never done such vulgar comedy before. Even Dhawan had been behaving himself since the controversial Sarkaiy lo khatiya... song and dance from his Raja Babu some years ago.
But desperation breeds compromises. Dhawan has been going through a lean patch at the box-office with two of his films failing to rake in the moolah this year despite having Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, Ajay Devgan and Salman Khan in the lead.
And in Chor Machaaye..., Dhawan's eagerness to score shows up in unlikely places.
At the 'police headquarters', one sees the unlikeliest of sights -- Bipasha Basu dressed as a cop! And then slipping into suitably short dresses for composer Anu Malik's excruciatingly bland and boorish songs.
Bipasha is always dressed for the occasion. The same goes for the film's other leading lady Shilpa Shetty who plays an airhead.
Suman dons various female avatars. But most of his female charade is borrowed from Chachi 420, down to the lascivious presence of the Rawail-Puri duo. While Kamal Haasan played the woman in Chachi... as a real character, Suman's role model seems to be drag queens of Bangkok's beaches.
The theme of 'inventing' a double to escape a sticky situation is straight out of Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Gol Maal. Dhawan has already done the twin-thing with Govinda in Coolie No.1. With Bobby Bobby for a leading man, the director seems more aggressively satirical than ever before.
To the actor's credit, he tries valiantly to keep up with Rawail, Puri and Suman's comic timing. But Bobby's character fails to get into the pace in scenes like the one where he courts Shilpa right under her screen-father's nose.
Timing is paramount to comedy. And yet no one seems to get it right.
Bobby's 'lovable' crook is balanced by two despicable crooks called Tito and Tony -- played by Rajat Bedi and Ashish Vidyarthi. It's tragic to see gifted actors from theatre and TV lending themselves so willingly to this farce.
If laughter is the best medicine, Chor Machaaye Shor is a bitter pill to swallow, especially for the police force that has been portrayed as a mass of mindless buffoons.
MOVIE REVIEWS