Laugh if you can...
Aremake of the hit Marathi film Poshter Boyz, this one is set somewhere in Haryana. Three young men find themselves on posters promoting vasectomy. Now, no one wants to have anything to do with them; women won’t consider marrying them; even their families are being frozen out.
The three buddies — Chaudhary Jagawar (Sunny Deol), VinaySharma (BobbyDeol) and Arjun Singh (Shreyas Talpade, also director of the film) — must take on the health department to prove that their photos were used without permission. Until they clear their names, they’ll remain the butt of jokes.
It’s a sensible theme, with the population crisis and female infanticide angles mixed in. It’s almost half an hour before Talpade shows us the actual posters, but still, all is going well.
The gags are fun, even if they are silly. A blind old woman who sleeps with a revolver under her pillow touches Sunny Deol’s face and says, “Dharmendra?’ Bobby replies, “Nahin, unka beta.”
Talpade shoots him a quizzical look; his expression says, ‘What else could I do?’ It’s that kind of funny, but it works. Until it doesn’t. The jokes get more and more embedded in the Deol family fan club. There are references to earlier films, borders, you get the gist. Worse still, the same jokes are retold five different times before they dig up a new one. And the humour gets increasingly crass.