MUMBAI: Everyone in the film has a problem with someone else. The wife has a problem with her husband, boyfriend with girlfriend, friend with friend, cops with the crooks and audience with director. Yet the film is titled ‘No Problem’. You certainly don’t expect that to be sarcastic since Anees Bazmee has preset his humour in the slapstick mode. Everything from the characterizations to the chronicle is patchy.
So you have Suniel Shetty playing a powerless international don Marcos who is always accompanied by his team of power ranger prototypes. One of them (Ranjeet) has facial hair trimmed such that it can give the Jaani Dushman zombie a run for its money. Another one (Vishwajeet Pradhan) has a handycam perpetually pasted on his palms to shoot uninterrupted video footage to an extent that you tend to believe if he is ‘Bigg Boss’.
There’s also a vamp (Neetu Chandra) who puts in a cabaret before combating the opponent. And you will be ‘shocked’ to know that one sidekick (Mukesh Tiwari) can literally transmit electricity by touching anyone. If you are still wondering why are we discussing the villain and his sidekicks in such detail, that’s the utmost level of creativity that Anees Bazmee displays in the entire script.
Anil Kapoor plays a fainthearted cop who wins accidental and undue fame, in the same way how Govinda got, more than one and a half decade back in ‘Gambler’. Sanjay Dutt keeps shouting ‘control control’ (which he has been doing with Govinda since ‘Jodi No1’ days) though everything keeps going out of control. Akshaye Khanna dresses in drag to disastrous outcome.
It’s never clear whether he’s wooing Kangana or Kangana’s wooing him and they clearly fail to appeal the audience with their woo-den acts. Sushmita’s sen-sational split-personality stint reinstates your belief that the film is slapstick. So does a lie-detection test where poor Paresh Rawal is literally beaten with slaps and sticks!
Predictably all characters are connected through some stolen diamonds. The childish conduct of the screenplay shows off as the hero and villain keep playing games like chor-police, land and water and fire in the mountain. Perhaps the writers assume racist jokes account to black comedy. A chubby child takes off on a flight of fantasy holding on to gas balloons. Clearly the director has treated the film too lightly.
More animated acts ensue as a gorilla farts, fishes swallow diamonds and Anil Kapoor pukes out bullets. Are you still asking what the story is? So are we. But that’s asking for too much. Every scene in the screenplay is written to cover up the flaw of the earlier scene thereby making it a manipulated narrative. Even the dialogues are too dull for a comedy film.
The characters are caricatures and the writing is convoluted. The music is unexciting, editing is full of continuity lapses and the foreign locations are wasted. Performances vary from average to atrocious. Anil Kapoor is conventional. Akshaye Khanna screams at the slightest provocation. Sanjay Dutt is restrained with decent comic timing but remains under-utilized.
Paresh Rawal is typecast. Kangana Ranaut shouldn’t attempt comedy. She seems to have more accent issues than Katrina Kaif and also fumbles in her dialogue delivery. Recent reports suggested that Anil Kapoor plans to show this film to his Hollywood co-star Tom Cruise.
If that happens Bollywood cinema gaining dignity and respect on a global platform seems like Mission Impossible. While we are certainly not asking for intellectual cinema, this one doesn’t even qualify as an entertainer. We definitely have problem with such films.
