All is Well
Genre: Drama/Comedy
Director: Umesh Shukla
Cast: Abhishek Bachchan, Rishi Kapoor, Asin, Supriya Pathak, Zeishan Ayyub, Seema Pahwa
Can Shravan Kumar exist today? Director Umesh Shukla who showed that he can recreate the old school cinema with social message with Oh! My God fumbles here.
Set in a Punjabi family here the message gets buried under a cliched and chaotic comic form brimming with stereotypes. It is a kind of film where Punjabi characters make an entry with balle balle and even actors who are known to be restrained try to outshout each other. So much so that in the darkness of the theatre your hand inadvertently starts searching for the remote.
One doesn’t have a problem with loud humour provided the punchlines are potent and they serve the purpose of the script. Here Shukla has taken slapstick quite literally as he punches us numb.
Deep down there is a story and if you look closely the subject has potential. Inder (Abhishek) is a singer who has lost faith in love and romance because he has seen the acrimonious relationship of his parents (Rishi Kapoor and Supriya Pathak). He resists the advances of a well meaning girl (Asin) so that history doesn’t repeat itself. As always Bhalla wanted his son to run the family business but the son has his own ambitions. He feels his father was lazy and lacked the drive.
It is a relevant subject in times when the generation gap is widening more than ever before but the way it is packaged it is shrill and shallow. You neither care for the father nor your heart goes out for the son.
And as the intrinsic logic doesn’t appeal in the first half they begin to irritate. Some how such characters fall in the lap of Abhishek and once again he is at sea. Your heart goes out to Asin who is caught in a wrong car here. Yes there is an in-built road trip a well. Perhaps some marketing guy has advised that it is in these days. Supriya Pathak who plays an Alzheimer’s patient will like to forget it as a bad memory. Even the usually reliable Seema Pahwa is unbearable here. In between Shukla makes fun of a dead body but fails to resuscitate the narrative. Even Sonakshi Sinha’s item number looks jaded.
It is late in the second half when Bhalla tells his son his back story that the film reflects some purpose but by then one would have given up on Bhalla and sons.
Bottom line: Oh! My God well acquires a whole new meaning here!
