KIS KISKO PYAAR KAROON (U/A)
Director: Abbas-Mustan
Cast: Kapil Sharma, Arbaaz Khan, Elli Avram,
Varun Sharma, Manjari Fadnis, Simran Kaur Mundi
Running time: 136 minutes

On Comedy Nights With Kapil, the Colors TRP topper that has made India double up in laughter every weekend night, its sharp and smart-talking host Kapil Sharma consistently directs many a misogynist barb at his on-screen wife — from insulting her family to passing rude remarks on her bee-stung lips. As Navjot Singh Sidhu, in his neon turban and pocket square, erupts with his trademark guffaws, we join in, most often laughing the loudest.

In Kis Kisko Pyaar Karoon — his hop, skip and jump into Bollywood — Kapil takes the joke too far, ending up with three wives and a girlfriend, stringing them along through the film’s 136-minute running time without anyone getting the wiser, and yet managing to come out unscathed at the end. 

The women in this film are all cut from the same bimbette cloth: they worship the ground their husband(s) walks on, are ready to die rather than live without a man, and are perfectly okay with the idea of sharing him. All of this would have been fun in the name of entertainment, but Kis Kisko Pyaar Karoon is neither funny nor entertaining. 

Yes, Kapil does a ‘babaji ka thullu’ (which roughly translates as #epicfail) here. His debut film has very little of him doing what he does best: deliver those laugh-out-loud funny lines in trademark deadpan. Instead, what we have is a debutant trying to do it all — sing and dance, romance and cry — but sorry, there is no Kapil Sharma — the one we love — in sight. 
It doesn’t help that directors Abbas-Mustan — the men in white better known for their twist-a-minute plots than their comic capers — have given Kapil a laughably stupid plot. Shiv Ram Kishan Kumar (Kapil) calls each of his three marriages a “haadsa”, portraying himself as a do-gooder who married women in distress. When it comes to women, ‘no’ is not a word that exists in his dictionary because his mother (Supriya Pathak) always told him never to break a woman’s heart. Yes, it’s that lame! 

So, he becomes Shiv for one, Ram for the other and Kishan for yet another, even as his girlfriend knows him as Kumar. But the strain of keeping all his wives happy starts taking its toll on our man. So, he sets up home with all of them on different floors of the same building, even gifting an apartment to his lawyer-friend Karan (Varun Sharma) so that he can rush to his aid when things get too hot to handle. 

Despite the ludicrous premise, Kapil’s shenanigans keep the first half breezy. The situations are predictable and the wit often dry, but some scenes do make you smile, if not laugh out loud. Like the one at the mall where all the three wives almost run into each other, and the one involving the mystery of the ‘flying’ underwear. Kapil is a riot whenever he’s being himself — especially when he smooth-talks all his wives into believing him without batting an eyelid — but put the man in a serious scene or a romantic song and the film goes all downhill.

You can only stretch a joke up to a point and the laughter dies easily and quickly in Kis Kisko Pyaar Karoon. Things get even more ridiculous post-interval, with Abbas-Mustan taking the film back to the trashy masala fare that Bollywood inflicted on its viewers in the ’90s… and we aren’t just talking gaudy sets and garish clothes. The last few scenes — in which an emotional Shiv Ram Kishan Kumar is portrayed as a man who did all he did for the betterment of the women in his life — make you cringe. So who does he land up with among the four? Think Draupadi in the Mahabharata. 

While the women (Manjari Fadnis, Simran Kaur Mundi, Sai Lokur and Elli Avram) do little else but pout and preen through the film, Arbaaz Khan is insufferable in the role of a don with a hearing disability. Fukrey man Varun Sharma does have his moments, but those are few and far between. 

A word for Kapil: just stick to what you do best. See you on Comedy Nights on Sunday night. 

Priyanka Roy
My message to Kapil after watching Kis Kisko Pyaar Karoon is.... Tell t2@abp.in