Great Grand Masti: Neither great, nor grand with zero masti

Inanities abound in this most banal and boring of sex comedies

July 15, 2016 08:18 pm | Updated July 16, 2016 03:27 pm IST

Some films make you roll your eyes. So much that they begin to hurt. Great Grand Masti could not stir up any other reaction in me. It had me rolling my eyes when Prem (Aftab Shivdasani) plays piano with, guess what, his instrument that is in the state of a Viagra-induced erection. His friends Amar (Riteish Deshmukh) and Meet (Vivek Oberoi) rib him for playing piano with his bansuri (flute). The ditty being performed is as meaningful — Khambe jaisi khadi hai .

The three men are desperate for some action but can’t get any at home. While Amar is saddled with a witch of a mom-in-law, Prem has a juvenile sister-in-law messing up his life and for Meet it’s his alarmingly muscular brother-in-law, the wife’s twin, who plays the spoilsport. So they decide to go to Amar’s derelict, haunted bungalow in Dudhwadi where they encounter a ghost, Ragini, who is also looking for some action. Just like them. You see it’s the suhaag raat (with just about anyone) that can get her the due deliverance.

Eye-rolling sequences keep unfolding, especially in the second half. Babu Rangeela (Shreyas Talpade in a cameo), a gigolo (the filmmaker, assuming that audience would not know what it means very helpfully has one his character explain that he is a male prostitute), gets turned into a chicken and eventually cooked into a dish with two friends fighting for the breast piece and the leg piece. And if that wasn’t enough there is Baba Antakshari (Sanjay Mishra) pooping watermelon, a very large one at that. It made me cry (besides rolling the eyes) at the plight of this very fine actor.

Great Grand Masti had positioned itself as an adult comedy with an added zing of horror. So obviously one couldn’t go looking for cerebral humour. Crudity, vulgarity, titillation, infantility is all one expected but also hoped against hope for it to deliver a few risqué laughs. No such luck. Banal and boring is all you get.

Inane innuendoes — about withdrawal, deposits and closing accounts — and unfunny jokes keep flowing, specially the ones to do with the penis — it is variously compared to a mouse and the flagging hands of a watch stuck at 6.30. Tastelessness dips to a new low with a dose of ageist humour setting in. Old ladies get referred to as baasi pao (stale bread). There is an entire sequence that is all about the three losers attempting to have sex with Amar’s mother-in-law. Now what was so funny about it? All the indecency gets conveniently rounded off with talk of karwa chauth , tradition and culture and ultimately Great Grand Masti comes across as nothing more than a joke on the viewers.

Rating: one

Director: Indra Kumar

Starring: Riteish Deshmukh, Aftab Shivdasani, Vivek Oberoi, Sanjay Mishra, Urvashi Rautela

Run time: 134 mins

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