Starring Feroz Khan, Anil Kapoor, Akshay Kumar, Katrina Kaif, Paresh Rawal
Written & Directed by Anees Bazmi
Rating: *

The most interesting part of this splintered comedy is Mallika Sherawat's con-woman's character whose agreeable coquettishness is applied to the love lives of two goofy gangsters played by Nana Patekar and Anil Kapoor, both on the look-out for a suitably noble bridegroom for their pretty sister Katrina Kaif.

Among the two leading ladies Mallika definitely has the spicier livelier and more animated role. Mock-romancing Kapoor and Patekar, Sherawat doesn't quite bring the house down.

But at least she's funnier than some of the brainwaves that pass off as comedy in this brain-strain of a film...like the climax which has all the character camped in a wooden shack perched in the middle of yawning precipice.

Honestly, it isn't just the precipice that's yawning by the time the climax screeches into sight.

Check this out for comic writing skills: Feroz Khan the senior-most don of the loud loutish lot of mobsters, is led to believe that his son is dead.

A good (?) twenty minutes of the script goes into Anil, Nana, Paresh Rawail (no Bollywood comedy is complete without him) and of course Akshay Kumar running helter-skelter pretending Feroz Khan's son is dead when in fact he's running around the cremation trying to attract his intellectually-challenged dad's attention.

Laughing in the face of death is a wonderful thing. We saw the death-defying drollery occur earlier this year in Rahul Rawail's comedy Buddha Mar Gaya.

Writer-director Anees Bazmi does the festive farce with more finesse. The narrative avoids crudity most of the way even as the goofball antics of the characters gets progressively outlandish. Cars break into two halves, guns go off in the wrong direction, and the actors act more crazed than characters in a lunatic asylum.

Yawn. Another comedy. Another day in the life of laughter in the long history of comic films from Bollywood.

But .....how do we bear with this one beyond a point? Sure we giggle a bit at the outset. But we don't really get to see the comic aptitudes of Anees Bazmi develop beyond a cluster of gags and skits beaded together in broad strokes of crude satire.

Akshay Kumar manfully allows Katrina to rescue him from a fire. But who rescues us the audience from the raging flames of ennui that soon envelope us as we watch the talented cast make a fool of itself?