The climax of Golmaal Again — that comes 151 minutes after facing the danger of having your butt stuck permanently to your seat (and not because it’s immensely watchable) — is set in a library where books fly off the shelves and attack the villain, beating him black-and-blue and ultimately rendering him almost senseless. In any other Rohit Shetty film — including the other three Golmaals — cars, and not books, would have been the weapon of choice, even if the action was taking place in a library. With Golmaal Again, the Golmaal universe undergoes a shift, albeit slight, to give us a film that tries to put up a semblance of a plot and not just rely on a series of gags. Did we say Tabu is in this film? Did we mention ‘change?’
Tabu’s Anna, a librarian in picturesque Ooty, also “sees dead people”, functioning as a medium and the narrator of the film. Unlike the other films in the franchise, Golmaal Again rewinds a few decades to where it all started — Gopal, Madhav, Lucky and the two Laxmans grow up in an Ooty orphanage. Friends as kids, they are now part of rival gangs, with Gopal (Ajay Devgn) and Laxman I (Shreyas Talpade) staying buddies and Madhav (Arshad Warsi), Lucky (Tusshar Kapoor) and Laxman II (Kunal Kemmu) joining forces. The ‘golmaal’ in their lives continues, and they maintain their old (and new) quirks — Laxman I lisps, Gopal still can’t resist breaking a finger pointed at him and unintelligible sounds continue to function as Lucky’s vocabulary.
The first hour of Golmaal Again is spent establishing the grown-up rivalry between the childhood pals, even as Rohit Shetty spins together some trademark Golmaal gags — Babli (Sanjay Mishra) continues to misspell, Pandu (Vrajesh Hirjee) goes ‘naagin, naagin’ at the slightest chance…. It’s only when the five men land up as paying guests in the same bungalow adjoining the orphanage they grew up in that Golmaal Again changes gears — spirits run amok in the house, the caretaker (played by Parineeti Chopra) has a suspicious presence and real-estate tycoon Vasu Reddy (Prakash Raaj) makes an entry to play villain.
The twist, which you can spot a mile away if you’ve watched enough Bollywood, arrives at interval point, but to Shetty’s credit, it’s smartly done, bringing on both horror and ha-ha.
A big reason why Golmaal Again is slightly more watchable than the last film, that came out seven years ago, is that Devgn doesn’t seem to be sleepwalking through his role. Macho man by day, Gopal is petrified of ghosts and the scenes where he quakes in his boots and Laxman twists around lyrics to lull his pal to sleep are laugh-out-loud fun. Also, Gopal’s age difference with Parineeti’s Damini/ Khushi — in a case of reel imitating real — is a running gag, which thankfully, doesn’t run out of steam.
But at slightly more than two-and-a-half hours, Golmaal Again does overstay its welcome, especially when the scene shifts to the serious in the last hour. It doesn’t help that a sneering Neil Nitin Mukesh pops in to spoil the party — and the film — with Golmaal Again limping to a predictable, and painful, end.
As expected in a Golmaal film, Golmaal Again is peppered with acts that range from passable to annoying. The men exaggerate their moods and mannerisms in keeping with the tone of the film, while Parineeti, in her first Golmaal film, just about passes muster, even though the big twist is built around her. Johny Lever, with his Pappi, is a riot in the way only Johny Lever can and Sanjay Mishra brings on the loudest laughs, especially when he nonchalantly hurls insults like, “Besuron ke Justin Bieber” and “Bachchon ke Rajpal Yadav”. It’s to Tabu’s credit that she manages to pull through, overshadowing everyone else in that one comic scene as a medium where she “invokes” a spirit with, “Eeem... breem... cold cream!” And though there’s no need for it in the film, who will really mind Nana Patekar — in “machhar-hijra” mode — popping in for a two-minute cameo.
Off to a cracker off a start at the box office on Friday, Golmaal Again will probably mint crores galore, enough to bankroll a fifth film. With at least some measure of plot and performance, a start has been made to give some meat to the mindless madness that has been made to pass off in the other Golmaals. But next time, can we go back to some soaring SUVs please? Flying books just don’t make the cut.
Priyanka Roy
