Humshakals Review: Humshakals is brainless from start to finish. It’s a massive dust bunny of a film; a big ball of dust is formed out of one failed gag after another until finally, at the end of two and half hours, you vacuum it away forever.
Rating: *
Director: Sajid Khan
Cast: Saif Ali Khan, Riteish Deshmukh, Ram Kapoor, Bipasha Basu, Esha Gupta, Tamannaah Gupta, Chunkey Pandey, Satish Shah, Lots of Clueless Foreigners
The hall being small allows Mukta Multiplex to send young attendants, clutching menu cards in their shaky hands, to each patron who opts to wait inside during the interval. One hurriedly came to me as an age-old ad of Samrat namkeen (ads those days were highly informative, mentioning statistics nobody cares a damn about) played on the screen. Well before he could shove the menu to my face, I inquired “Do you have HIT Poison Parathe?”.
He looked at me incredulously; most attendants in
any establishment work like automatons, unable to respond swiftly to customized orders (especially when they were as bizarre as mine). “Not sure, but we have cheese puff” he replied after much thought. I sent him away. I was out of luck –
I guess you don’t get HIT Poison Parathe that easily. That is unless you are in Sajid Khan’s chamgadar-shit crazy world, where delicacies such as Cocaine and Vodka ke parathe are whipped up on demand. I’ve never taken cocaine. I drink Vodka though. Maybe if I’d taken those, I’d have enjoyed Humshakals. But at that very moment, all I longed for was HIT Poison ke parathe. To only be able to enjoy an ‘escapist’ film when high is cheating, destroying the very purpose of the film’s ‘escapist’ nature.
I chose to sit through the whole film. I’d walked out of Grand Masti last year, finding it unapologetically offensive apart from being brainless. Humshakals is brainless from start to finish. It doesn’t offend, but Sajid’s ‘punches’ are so weak you instead pity him and watch the film till the end. It’s a massive dust bunny of a film; a big ball of dust is formed out of one failed gag after another and finally, at the end of two and half hours, you vacuum it away forever. There’s little I remember now about the film, except Ram Kapoor in drag – an unpleasant sight.
The film’s humor is almost necrophilic. A necrophiliac, for those who don’t know, is a person who has sex with dead bodies. Humshakals excavates then exploits dead-and-buried jokes, situations and stereotypes. The ‘shut up/shirt up’ joke. The ‘6 scared of 7 because 7 ‘ate’ 9’ joke. The mistaken identities situation. The man turns to animal situation. The gay stereotype. The drag stereotype. The Nepali stereotype. The South Indian stereotype. One scene is seemingly inspired by Spiderman; in this, Ritesh Deshmukh and Saif Ali Khan, the leads, hang on tightly to metal bars in the ceiling in the bathroom while trying to escape the mental asylum. The warden, played by Satish Shah, checks every toilet but finds nobody. Deshmukh can’t control his bladder and lets off first a jet and then a deluge of ‘susu’ or ‘pipi’ from above as Shah looks on confused for the source of susu. He’s perhaps too dimwitted to look right above him. Even this gag isn’t original; Superhero Movie has already parodied the Spiderman moment before in a very similar way (the original Spiderman didn’t pee of course; he was bleeding).
Relatively original gags are reinforced as though Khan thought we wouldn’t understand them the first time. Saif’s character Ashok, the General Manager of multimillion dollar Singhania Petrochemicals, pursues stand-up comedy as a hobby. He’s terrible, stealing all his jokes from the first joke book he must’ve gotten his hands on. The initial scenes serve absolutely no purpose except to work (or rather fail to work) as a preemptive move for Sajid; they seem to suggest ‘Sajid’s a multimillionaire just like Ashok, and he spends it recklessly on making devilawful (no such word exists but I just can’t use god-awful because it contains the word ‘God’, which shouldn’t be used in any context whatsoever while talking of Humshakals. And I’m saying this as an atheist.) films because he’s rich and bored and wants to splurge his wealth on something that can bring more wealth if he’s lucky (if it were his true passion, he’d be making way better films).
Anyway, so Ashok finds an admirer in Shanaya, the PJ enjoying reporter at Channel 9 who laughs heartily at his jokes like he’s some Russell Peters (she’s perhaps got the worst taste in comedians EVER). She says “You’re so witty!”. He quips “And you are so Churchgate!”. They both laugh. Those who know Churchgate and Victoria Terminus in Mumbai would certainly the joke. She dumbly continues “Ohhh… Churchgate… witty…VT” like Hansa from the comedy show Khichdi, just to make sure people ‘got’ the joke. Well, those who don’t know either Churchgate or VT wouldn’t have made head or tails even then, so what was the point of repetition? I’m glad Sajid didn’t go all the way and flash images of Churchgate and VT so everybody could get the joke; would’ve just reinforced how pathetic the joke was in the first place.
There are random, pointless improvisations. Riteish, playing Kumar, does his Ashok Kumar impression because Saif is Ashok and he’s Kumar, get it? Saif does a couple. They just do it at the oddest time for no rhyme or reason. There is really no work on timing; Khan thinks he can drop a joke at any point of time and people will find it funny. A gang of girls and a few boys sitting behind me did. They seemed to be the kind of audiences who’d laugh only to tell everybody they’ve ‘got the joke’.
But I didn’t laugh nor did most of the audience members. We pitied the lack of plot. All I can tell you about ‘plot’ is this – three pairs of Humshakals or lookalikes, a plot hatched by uncle Kans (played by Ram Kapoor) to take over Singhania empire that sends sane ones to a mental asylum, a case of mistaken identities that sends the insane ones out while keeping the sane ones in, the sane guys’ plan to collaborate with an insane humshakal of Kans to thwart his plans, a lot of confusion that leads to Saif, Ritesh and Ram cavorting in ghastly dresses, and everything finally getting sorted out in the Buckingham palace, where the Prince speaks shuddha Hindi and Chunkey Pandey suddenly and randomly introduces a bombing subplot. I really don’t know what purpose Bipasha Basu , Tamannaah Bhatia and Esha Gupta served in this film. Ah yes, someone had to stand in for the can’t-do-away-without shots of heaving, jiggling bosoms that are a staple of such films. Maybe they could used Ram Kapoor’s bloating man boobs in their next film. Was this statement offensive? I really don’t care! Next time, don’t introduce drag only because that’s one of the few things people here still find it funny (the gay stereotypes flopped totally; I guess the audience sensitivity has increased over the years). And by the way, Riteish Deshmukh has perfected the art of cross dressing over the years; his drag queen impression here is a cross between Celina Jaitley and Rakhi Sawant. Saif, on the other hand, looks embarrassing.
Considering Humshakals’ absence of originality, I’m going to be unoriginal and summarize the film using someone else’s quote. But rather than quoting from an easily available source, I’m going to reiterate the words legendary critic Roger Ebert used to describe the film ‘Freddy Got Fingered’. It goes like this ‘This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels’. The only thing in the movie comparable to barrels is Ram Kapoor’s pot belly. And perhaps a barrel is what Sajid Khan would need to cover himself up if he makes another public appearance to promote his film. Oh maybe you didn’t get this joke. Maybe I need to do what Sajid did in Humshakals and explain the joke to you: ‘Barrels because the public would rip his clothes apart, get it? GET IT? Barrel to cover him because he’s without clothes HA HA! He’s nanga! HA HA! Barrel!’.
This is exactly how Humshakals repeats its jokes. Nine times (and sometimes even more) because Sajid thinks you wouldn’t get his humor otherwise.
ourvadodara.in Rating Guide
* – Avoid!!
** – Rent It/ TV Premiere
*** – Book The Cheapest Seats
****- Book the Best Seats
*****- Book the Best Seats + Buy the DVD
