Double Whammy:
It is very difficult to go wrong with a film based on Shakespeare’s A Comedy Of Errors, which inspired a wonderful Kishore Kumar-Asit Sen comedy Do Dooni Chaar (1968), which, one of its writers, Gulzar, remade into Angoor (1982), starring Sanjeev Kumar and Deven Varma, adding much wit to the script.
Double roles and trading places films have been made several times, the humour in these two films was enhanced by not one set of duplicates, but two, and to multiply the confusion, they have the same names. The strange situation and the hilarity caused by it had to be accepted without question to make it amusing. Rohit Shetty, attempting a pointless remake, gets into a garbled nature-versus-nurture debate, as a doctor (Murali Sharma), in a blatantly unethical act, swaps the two sets of twins in the orphanage he runs.
One Roy-Joy set (Ranveer Singh-Varun Sharma) is adopted by a circus owner in Ooty, and the other by a rich Bangalore couple. The circus Roy has an awe-inducing superpower, he is impervious to electric current, but his twin twitches uncontrollably, and so does anyone who touches him, when the other Roy does his circus act with live wires.
Comedy was built into the plot, but Shetty, unused to simplicity and overly fond of slapstick, gets four screenwriters (Yunus Sajawal, Sanchit Bedre, Vidhi Ghodgaonkar and Farhad Samji), to exaggerate everything; then he unleashes a bunch of loud, eye-popping buffoons in supporting roles, who are more irritating than funny.
Like in the original, one of the Roys is married to Mala (Pooja Hegde), the other has a girlfriend (Jaqueline Fernandez) with a suspicious father, Rai Bahadur (Sanjay Mishra) and his loony sidekick. Prem (Anil Charanjjeet). The mayhem happens when both twins happen to be in the same city– the outsiders keep running into people who recognize them, and the Ooty residents cannot understand what is going on.
A gang of thieves led by Momo (Siddharth Jadhav), and later his mentor Polson Dada (Johny Lever), turn up to stir the cauldron; the film would actually have been better off without them.
Going by the retro soundtrack, the film is set sometime in the late 1960s, for no apparent reason, except that it obviously had to be sometime before cell phones. To make things worse, Shetty uses a kitschy production design with every structure and car in bright colours and the landscapes oversaturated.
The two lead actors are subdued by the gibbering clowns they are surrounded with; and if it wasn’t for a dance number with Deepika Padukone, inexplicably in a restaurant called Madras Café, Ranveer Singh would have no chance to show off his famed energy.
With a successful director’s vanity, Shetty pays tribute to himself by turning Cirkus into an origin story for the characters in his Golmaal franchise. But while it’s running, he cannot extract much entertainment from the film.
