A disgusting, reprehensible, hugely and openly offensive, tasteless, unfunny, juvenile, repulsive, vulgar and lurid piece of trash. Trash it!

Rating: *

I have walked out of certain films for a number of reasons. I walked out of a Tamil comedy ‘Thillu Millu’ after the interval because it was too great a challenge to bear its lowbrow humor. Another Tamil film ‘Thalaiva’ had me scurrying to the theatre’s exit gate, a scene or two before the film ended, because it was directionless and painfully long. I hated everything about Ranjhaana, the Dhanush and Sonam Kapoor starrer – the weak performances, the horrid writing, the poor cinematography and the wasted music – and gave up towards the climax.

There are a few other movie turkeys that didn’t appeal to my taste, but never have I left a film for offending my sensibilities until this afternoon, when I decided to walk out of the

screening of Grand Masti, finding it unbearable, not more than forty minutes into the film. This film is a disgusting, reprehensible, hugely and openly offensive, tasteless, unfunny, juvenile, repulsive, vulgar and lurid piece of trash that somehow cleared censors and managed to get a wide release when the right place for it, and the people associated with it, is the garbage bin.

Never has a mainstream Bollywood film so shameless objectified or rather ‘whorified’ the fairer sex, and never has Indian cinema shown men so desperate and needy for sex or (in their language) the ‘f-word’. If you can laugh-out-loud or LOL on lines like ‘Balaatkaar se yaad aaya, meri biwi kahaan hai?’, character names like “Hard-DICK” (for Hardik), puerile gags like seeing a man getting bitten in his privates by a cat called ‘pussy’ (which extends to an entire scene where the word is used several times as a double entendre) and series of rape jokes, then I suggest you… still skip Grand Masti and admit yourself in a sex addiction rehab instead.

Judging by the audience response towards this film, I think Vadodara seriously needs to invest less in constructing flyovers and more sex education programmes. A film like Grand Masti does a big disservice to good people’s efforts to prevent crimes against women. It degrades a woman’s value, explicitly downgrading her worth to a sex object. Why would a city like Vadodara, with its rich culture, open the palace gates (as parts of Grand Masti was shot in Laxmi Vilas Palace) to a film like this? I wonder if the royalty is possessed by the ghost of deviant emperor Caligula?

A good sex comedy has the right balance of sex and comedy in its situations to develop a coherent story. Grand Masti, however, thinks thinks that sex ITSELF is the story, and so there’s nothing in the film that’s not sex. The scenes therefore look like cheap exposition sequences of hardcore porn films. Here’s an example that’ll give you an idea of just how cheap this movie is: a guy goes upto a girl and puts a condom onto the closed umbrella she’s holding. A girl he has never met before. Isn’t that generally the kind of characters created for raunchy porn? Now there’s Grand Masti to make raunch mainstream.

For those readers expecting plot synopsis, here’s what I can tell based on the parts I’d seen: Aftab Shivdasani, Vivek Oberoi and Riteish Deshmukh are three married men whose voracious sexual needs are neglected by their wives due to reasons like, you know, kids, family and work. These three guys want the women to basically ‘play with their birdies’, and attempt to lure them to bed. Shivdasani’s wife, similar to his wife in Masti, the superior prequel of this vile trash, is a gharwali for whom family needs are more important; there’s nothing much to distinguish this wife, unlike Masti where his wife played by Tara Sharma devoted her life to teerth yatras and fasts. Vivek Oberoi’s wife is devoted to work, and he suspects (wrongly) that she’s mingling with their boss (they work together); there’s a execrable gag in the beginning where actress Karishma Tanna, who plays the wife, is on her knees admiring a puppy while her boss is standing opposite her, with his back towards Oberoi, leading him to think that she’s admiring his penis. There have been gags like this in English films, but they know when the joke turns from funny to plain disgusting. Riteish Deshmukh hates that his wife spends more time with the kid than with his dick and is willing to give his own child to a thief at one point. Isn’t the level of desperation shocking?

Thankfully, these three deviants are invited on reunion trip to their college (S.L.U.T.S or Shree Lalchand University of Technology and Science. Get the joke? Ha Ha (sigh)) so that they can hit on other women (at least better than seeing them treating their wives as toys of pleasure). Unfortunately, their trip hits a bump when they find that their dictatorial principal, who chopped off the privates of any man who eyed girls, is still in college and has turned it into a place where ‘boys and girls respect each other albeit out of fear’. Director Indra Kumar implies that without this principal, the girls would strip to their bra and panties and throw themselves on any guy they can get their hands on. Anyway, the positive side is that the principal is at a conference in USA for three days, and hence the boys can have all the fun they want.

I left the theatre at the point when Bruna Abdulah (or one of the hot chicks whose names are mentioned on Wikipedia) is removing a rope, an umbrella, a toy rat, a hookah bar from Riteish Deshmukh’s backside. What actually happens is that Riteish is on his knees, cleaning the beer he has spilled, while Bruna is removing items from his bag that’s kept on the table behind him. Aftab and Vivek are outside, and only see the shadows of the two inside from a screen (or possibly a tent, but I wasn’t paying much attention) in-between them; so to these two doofuses, it seems like Bruna is picking it out of Riteish’s bum (they don’t realize there’s a table behind Riteish). Wish she could pull out a worthy sequel from his derriere, but that seems impossible now.

Aftab, Riteish and especially Vivek seem to have binged on a diet of cheese burgers in the years following the successful Masti. If they think Grand Masti is the baby to revive their diminishing careers, I suggest they give it to an orphanage. This film is an shameful disgrace, the unworthy fruit of an unholy matrimony between director Indra Kumar (surprisingly, the same person who directed Masti) and the trio of has-beens.

ourvadodara.in Rating Guide:

* = Avoid!!

** = Rent It / TV Premiere

*** = Book The Cheapest Seats

**** = Book The Best Seats

***** = Book The Best Seats + Buy The DVD!