/> Starring: Viveik Oberoi, Fardeen Khan, Amrita Rao, Esha Deol, Boman Irani;
Director: Indra Kumar;
Rating: *

First, the good news. After the other boys-will-be-boys comedy "Masti", Indra Kumar serves up a reasonably clean vegetarian dish in "Pyare Mohan" with the double innuendoes kept almost completely out of sight.

To Kumar's credit, some moments in the first-half between the deaf hero (Oberoi) and the blind hero (Khan) have a certain warmth of shared camaraderie especially when they share their girlfriend woes or try to see the lighter side of their handicaps.

But then you've seen Ralph Fiennes play a blind man in James Ivory's "The White Countess" at the same time as Fardeen's blind act. And you wonder how long we must continue to bear the atmosphere of mediocrity that prevails in a particular style of mainstream Hindi cinema.

To his credit, Indra Kumar tries to be stylish in the songs.

Milap Jhaveri's dialogues are occasionally crisp. Some of the deaf protagonist's mis-read lip movements are funny. The actors too do their bit to enhance the mood of complete surrender to the forces of satire. But then you begin to see through the film's feeble fabric of farce.

The noisy 'cool' song sequences, for instance, have now been done to a cliché. Except the fact that the film makes a pitch for the handicapped to have a normal even fun-filled life, "Pyare Mohan" has nothing to offer that would qualify as novel or engaging.

The second half is completely botched with the near mid-air crash experience of passengers reaching a nadir of mediocrity in filmmaking.

Indra Kumar's penchant for farce has never been a secret. Here he goes for a toned-down funny beginning that finally ends with the characters running helter-skelter in Bangkok - a beautiful city otherwise, here reduced to looking like the crowded traffic-choked highways of Mumbai. Like they say you can only take Bollywood out of Mumbai. But you can't take Mumbai out of Bollywood.

The search for the two lady loves (Esha Deol and Amrita Rao) in the hustle bustle of Bangkok is done in a revved-up hysterical slapstick style that Indra Kumar patented decades ago.

The climax with villain Boman Irani hurling empty bottles at the two heroines (talk about taking pot shots!) is straight out of a Chinese Kung Fu movie.

A queer mix of the mirthful and the monstrous, "Pyare Mohan" has stray moments that keep us smiling. But beyond that you really can't see "Pyare Mohan" as anything but a mellowed-down homage to the mood of "Masti".

For a film that purports to re-energise an age-old farcical formula, "Pyare Mohan" is shockingly clumsy in parts. Broad, belated attempts to push vulgarities into the second-half leave the narrative a bit flustered and frayed at the edges.