“The fourth edition of the Golmaal franchise is an unapologetic assault on all your senses. When you see the six leads actors (with the exception of Tabu) posing on bright red and yellow sports cars and giant confetti cannons bursting in the background, you’re almost tacitly warned of a film that is garishly colour corrected and unbearably loud. If you choose to stay on, you will witness filmmaker Rohit Shetty successfully wrecking the serenity of Ooty and Coonoor by somehow managing to make the lush green Southern hills appear neon and artificial. The background score is deafening, songs are rehashed from the 90s and the jokes are more self-referential than witty.”
Barely do we come across such scathing reviews of mainstream Bollywood films, but The Hindu was absolutely brutal in its assessment of the latest iteration of Rohit Shetty’s ‘comedy’ venture. Though, wasn’t it about time that we seriously questioned the incorrigibly fluff nature of the Rohit Shetty School of Filmmaking.
Call them blockbuster entertainers or list them in the highest-grossing movies every year, the filmmaker’s work can never be seen in a different light than a needless crashing of sports cars and implausible action sequences.
Shetty even ruined Bollywood’s favourite pairing of Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol by bringing them together in a frivolous movie called Dilwale. And what’s that plane wreckage doing in the middle of the Iceland-shot Gerua? Is that a little sign to how the film’s script came down crashing from the sky?
Moreover, it’s only Rohit Shetty who can make a hero out of a hapless Tusshar Kapoor. Haters will say that he has been trying to pull off the impossible by casting the actor repeatedly in all of his Golmaal movies, but he is actually doing social service right? Because that’s what the audience pays to watch on the big screens.
But the charity suddenly seems less generous when it comes to the other sex. The likes of Kriti Sanon, Ayesha Takia, Rimi Sen and once Bipasha Basu have only gotten solitary opportunities to prove themselves, unlike Tusshar Kapoor. But hey, don’t female actresses have a smaller shelf life?
And while life might be a struggle for an average movie-watcher, why not blind him with the idea of a common man Singham, who has 8-pack abs and 22-inch biceps so that he feels bad about himself for the rest of his life. After all filmmaking is only about moneymaking these days and why act all responsible and shit when you can burn all that overflowing money by bombing cars worth crores.
Dear Rohit Shetty, in case you don’t get the sarcasm, please play hard or go home!
