Not A Laugh In Sight:
As far as his Hindi movies are concerned, Priyadarshan has missed the target more often than he has hit it. He mostly remakes Malayalam films, many of them his own, and just a few of them have worked. He has made Hungama 2 after a longish gap; it is not a sequel to the 2003 Hungama, but a tired remake of his own 1994 Malayalam film Minnaram.
The plot is outdated, the style is old-fashioned, the acting too loud; there seems to be no reason for this film to even exist. On an OTT platform ((Disney-Hotstar) it must have got a few viewers (how many sat till the end?)–had it been released in the cinemas, it would have surely bombed.
Colonel Kapoor (Ashutish Rana) is fed-up of minding four awful brats of his older son Aman (Raman Trikha) when a young woman called Vaani (Pranitha Subhash) turns up with an infant in tow, claiming that the younger son, Akash (Meezaan Jaffery) is the father. Akash admits that he was in love with Vaani in college, but vehemently denies paternity of the child. His father, however, fearing social censure, agrees to let Vaani live in the house till her story can be verified.
Akash is engaged to be married to the daughter of his father’s friend (Manoj Joshi) and Vaani’s presence sours things for him, so he seeks the help of his friend Anjali (Shilpa Shetty). She has a jealous husband, Tiwari (Paresh Rawal) hovering around, hearing snatches of conversation and causing more misunderstanding.
Nothing in the film is remotely funny. It’s actually sad to see Priyadarshan regulars– Paresh Rawal, Tiku Talsania, Manoj Joshi, Rajpal Yadav—hamming away painfully. Even Johnny Lever turns up to pop his eyes and yell in a cameo as the children’s tutor. The only one who keeps the decibel level normal is Ashutosh Rana.
In this day and age, a DNA test would clear things up, and to tick that box, a test is ordered, and believe-it-or-not, the family cook is sent to fetch the results. He returns with a garbled verbal report. It does not occur to anyone to phone the lab and get a hard or soft copy of such a crucial document. If Akash plots to produce a fake husband for Vaani, would he get the college peon (Yadav). Who would laugh at such idiocy?
In this day and age, the threat of rape is used casually and a creepy suspicious husband is supposed to be humorous? It must be the memory of Hera Pheri that made Paresh Rawal accept this role.
If at all anyone could benefit from the release of Hungama 2, it is Shilpa Shetty (the terrible timing of a scandal involving her husband notwithstanding), who dances to her old hit Chura ke dil mera (Main Khiladi Tu Anari– 1994), and looks like she made time stand still.
