The leopard print waistcoat, the shocking pink scarf and the tilted cowboy hat are resting near the head of the bed. He is sitting with his silky green shirt unbuttoned. From behind her heaving bosom, she looks at him and says: “How was it for you?” He turns around and replies: “Next time, put more elaichi in the payasam!”

Well, you can’t expect anything non-vegetarian from this superman who will put a hole in your head if you even mention the cocktail Sex on the Beach. He is the only cowboy in the world who protects cows. He can’t remember the lines from the “Clinton Eastwood” movie he saw as a child but he sure can make your day.

The earth is his bed. The sky is his ceiling. The whole of creation is his home. Welcome Murugan, Quick Gun Murugan.

Shashanka Ghosh’s oft-quoted Channel [V] character of the 1990s has finally jumped out of the small screen and onto big, bright celluloid. In the film, too, the man with the purple-rouged cheeks time travels from the 80s to 2007, from a small south Indian village to big bad Mumbai. And the two decades fail to create a crease on those rosy cheeks. Why? Because Chitragupta (Vinay Pathak) has sent him forward from the dead.

Quick Gun Murugan is as random as you can possibly imagine. It’s the kind of film where people throw away guns and hurl green coconuts, where betel nuts are cracked open with bullets, where mothers are kidnapped for secret dosa recipes.

Primarily in English with a liberal sprinkling of Tamil and a smattering of Hindi, Quick Gun Murugan aims to be a big small indie film. Under its oddball veneer, it’s a campaign for vegetarianism where our shakahari superhero fights the guy running a meaty dosa chain called McDosa. Reason enough for Fox to put muscle behind the movie.

But despite QGM being truly hilarious in patches, it stops short of being laugh-out-loud funny. Shashanka’s brush is muted compared to Farah Khan who had her audience in hysterics with SRK’s enna rascala act in Om Shanti Om. He shies away from slapstick with a character who cries out for belly laughs.

The action set pieces work well — whether it’s Murugan fighting Gunpowder (Shanmugha Rajan) in the udipi restaurant or the top-of-the-traffic gun duel with Rowdy MBA (Raju Sundaram) or the climactic rooftop shootout with Rice Plate Reddy (Nasser). Shashanka uses special effects, stop motion and super slo-mos effectively to make the action look playful enough.

Even the romance bit is nice. Rambha’s Mango Dolly, the cleavage-baring moll with a big, er, heart, is cheeky enough to chip away at Murugan’s rock solid devotion to the dead lawyer lady in the locket.

However, Rice Plate’s fascination with procuring the perfect dosa recipe far overstays its scope and makes the 90-minute film feel long.

And so, Quick Gun Murugan ends up being a collection of those small skits on TV. You love some, you hate some, you don’t mind the others. Unlike Shashanka’s last film Waisa Bhi Hota Hai Part II, QGM never quite manages to muster up anything more.

You can’t blame Dr Rajendra Prasad, who plays Murugan deliberately flat. With such an outfit on his lightly bulged body, such lines on his lipsticked lips and such freewheeling bullets in his guns, anything more would have ruined the rainbow palette.

If SRK shouting “naughty pussy” and choking a soft toy tiger is your kind of laughs, QGM is not your bowl of payasam. But if you don’t want the extra elaichi, the 90 minutes are harmless fun. Mind it!!