'Dhoom Dadakka' - an unfunny comedy(Review)

Film: 'Dhoom Dadakka'; Cast: Sammir Dattani, Shama Sikandar, Shaad Randhawa, Arati Chabria, Anupam Kher, Satish Kaushik and Gulshan Grover; Director: Shashi Ranjan; Ratings: None

By the time Sammir Dattani and Shaad Randhawa get into drag, this unfunny comedy has dragged on way past 'bad' time.

Everyone uniformly hams through this painful piece of cinematic travesty. There is so much screaming and ranting across the length and breadth of this outrageous ode to idiocy that you wonder if the producer-director Shashi Ranjan intended to provide earplugs for all those brave hearts who would sit to the end of this haphazard comedy of terrors.

No earplugs, what we get are shrill banshee ring-tones of risque ragas sung at an ear-splitting pitch, and phallic jokes.

If lately you've been wondering where the Bollywood comedy has been heading, here's the answer.

Comedies can't get any baser or brainless than 'Dhoom Dadakka'. The gags make you gag. The items and innuendoes are embarrassing not because they try hard to be vulgar, but because they fail miserably to be sexy.

Vulgarity in this comedy of disembodied context depends completely on how many of the characters are crammed in one line of vision in every scene. They all stand making faces and gesticulating as though trying to attract the lifeguard's attention from a sinking boat.

The double meanings flow is in abundance mostly from the moist painted trembling lips of Deepshikha, who keeps referring to the size of 'big' things every time she spots a male member of the cast in her vicinity.

'Dhoom Dadakka' is a jumbo-sized non-event.

Before you fall of your creaky bed in comic splendour, let's move on to the main 'coarse' in this pickled over-spiced platter in a hotel that's probably named Romp Teri Giggle Maili.

The two guys, Sammir and Shaad grimace and giggle, roll their eyes and suck in their cheeks to indicate lies buried too deep for jeers. Add two girls - Aarti Chabria and Shama Sikandar trying so hard to be glamorous it's pathetic.

The characterisations take the cult of one-upmanship down to the level of a 'nukkad nautanki', what with every actor getting lost in the confusion of their mistaken identities.

In no time at all, the plot suffers from an identity crisis. Shashi Ranjan, who earlier made us laugh with his supposedly serious study of marital stress in 'Dobara', doesn't know whether to indulge tongue-in-cheek comedy of the Hrishikesh Mukherjee variety or just do the out-and-out no-fools-stops comedy of the David Dhawan-Anees Bazmi variety.

Eventually, the confusions that dominate the plot overpower every sense of aesthetic decency. In the end game where the entire cast runs around an amusement part looking for amusement, the two heroes get into drag to tease laughter out of an audience that's long since ceased to be entertained or amused.

In one chase sequence Shaad pees copiously on a street of Bangkok. You get jailed for dirtying the streets of Bangkok. Alas, there are no laws for desecrating the rules of aesthetics in cinema.