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.
- Director: Rohit Shetty
- Cast: Ajay Devgn, Parineeti Chopra, Tabu, Arshad Warsi, Tusshar Kapoor, Shreyas Talpade, Kunal Khemu, Prakash Raj and Neil Nitin Mukesh
- Storyline: Five friends try to save the orphanage they grew up in.
Being a franchise, the filmmaker had to at some point explore the genesis of the main characters and trace back their relationship with each other. The fourth part is all about that, except the back stories are not only painfully unoriginal but also overly saccharine. It has all the lazy cliches intended to make the film appear manipulatively family friendly and endearing: from an orphanage under attack to evil tycoons to a friendly ghost. Ask for a story line and you will get some more hackneyed ideas presented in a glittering and gaudy gift wrap. There’s a point in the film when the evil industrialist, who is eyeing the orphanage where the characters grew up, says, “ Mujhe sirf ek achche plot se matlab hai (I am only concerned with a good plot)”. If only Shetty mistook that for a plot line.
Unfortunately, what you are stuck with for two and half hours, is an unending series of gags that will make you choke on your popcorn with cringe and embarrassment. There is nothing endearing about buffoonery which involves a group of grown men acting like nincompoops. If you want to depict quarreling men who are brought together by a level-headed lady, you could do it in a dignified manner like the way Satte Pe Satta did back in 1982. But in Golmaal Again , the characters throw each other in washing machines, twist fingers and set butts on fire.
Everything in Golmaal Again (with three exclamation marks) is an exaggeration to the power of ten. But the worst of all is the glorification of heroism through violence and machismo. In the film, masculinity is defined by the ability to single-handedly fight a bunch of goons and Ajay Devgn’s temper is applauded as a heroic quality.
While all actors are at their embarrassing best, Tabu, as a librarian with superhuman ability to see ghosts, tries to lend some subtlety to her role. But she soon succumbs to Shetty’s tawdry cinematic style. At that point, you wish to take her aside and sympathetically ask, “Why, Tabu, why?”
A line that Tabu keeps repeating in the film -- almost as an SOS -- is, “ Jab God ki marzi hoti hain, tab logic nahi sirf magic hota hai (when God wishes, there isn’t any logic but only magic)”. Golmaal Again is completely devoid of both logic and magic, and as it appears, even God’s wish.
