You know the drill. If you've seen Meet the Parents .
But Total Siyappa is actually a remake of Argentine film Seres Queridos , where a girl takes her boyfriend home to meet the parents, and chaos sets in when he accidentally drops frozen soup from the kitchen window.
Ali Zafar lends the role a certain charm and Yami is likeable too. Except that we lose the connect with the film early on when the girl doesn't seem to care that her boyfriend may have killed someone… just because this is a comedy. Nor does the girl want to confirm if the man needs critical help. Or bother checking his identity.
These lapses in logic for the sake of comedy require quite a bit of willing suspension of disbelief and things only turn further farcical with employment of physical comedy. This rather forced comedy of errors within the house soon begins to look like a play mounted on screen minus the craft.
The good part, however, is that if you are willing to overlook these aspects, you will find yourself laughing or at least smiling, at the antics of Anupam Kher battling memory loss and Vishwa Badola who plays a visually challenged grandfather.
The rest of the film will give you a strong sense of deja vu and if you've seen the trailer, you've pretty much seen the best parts of the film. The promise of an India-Pakistan romantic comedy soon fizzles out since the film is more interested in the fate of the man knocked out by frozen soup halfway into the film.
Suddenly towards the end, the makers remember the India-Pakistan subplot and give the lead pair a little to fight about. But it barely scrapes the surface, for depth of argument or political incorrectness that you wonder why it was even sold as an Indo-Pak romance. This could have been a progressive film but like the character who had frozen soup dropped on his head, the film loses all memory of what it started out to do.
You can wait till it’s out on TV.
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Director: E. Nivas
Cast: Ali Zafar, Yami Gautam, Kirron Kher, Anupam Kher, Sara Khan, Vishwa Badola
Storyline: An Indian girl takes her Pakistani boyfriend home to meet the parents
Bottomline: A faithful remake that offers a few laughs and little else
