Let us begin with a simple question: how many sight gags does a vacuous slapstick comedy need in order to sustain itself over a runtime of two and a half hours, especially when each one of them takes next to no time to overstay its welcome?
The answer is provided sans ambiguity by the four writers of the Indra Kumar-directed Dhamaal 4 (Paritosh Painter, Vedd Prakash, Bunty Rathore and Balvinder Singh Suri). There is absolutely no limit to the silliness that can be crammed into a concoction as unabashedly birdbrained as this.
No matter how much the makers of the fourth instalment of the long-running Dhamaal franchise throw into its bottomless pit of mind-numbing inanities, nothing lands in one piece. If that were not enough, the film ends with the promise of another Dhamaal. One can only shudder at the thought!
But we might be wrong. May be there still is room and an audience out there for all the iterations of Dhamaal, Golmaal, Welcome, Housefull and Masti that Bollywood can conjure up. These romps have romped home with big bucks more often than not over the past couple of decades, but it is pretty obvious all these years later that their appeal is wearing thin.
Last year’s Mastii 4 was a box-office dud. Last month’s Welcome to the Jungle, though not exactly a flop, did not fare as well as it was expected. Dhamaal scrapes the bottom of the barrel for the most part. If it scrapes through, it would be a miracle of sorts.
The earth shatters, rock formations crumble into dust and the ground beneath the feet of Guddu (Ajay Devgn), Lallan (Riteish Deshmukh), Adi (Arshad Warsi), Manav (Jaaved Jafferi) and the rest of the Dhamaal gang gives way repeatedly, as they, pretty much like the film that they are in, grab at thin air and stare into abysses.
Nothing that Dhamaal 4 throws up (it does so more in hope than with conviction) stays afloat long enough to give the audience anything to crack up over.
The film is unfunny, tedious and dreadfully dunderheaded. The misadventures of the greed-crazed characters that people if are not half as hilarious as the repeated missteps of a film that goes out in search of disaster and finds it in ample measure.
Dhamaal 4 has the gall to turn the anthemic Bella Ciao into its Paisa Lao musical leitmotif, but it lacks the imagination and acumen to back that ill-advisedly audacious leap up with a screenplay that can do justice to all the CGI and AI-generated mayhem that that the film banks upon.
Needless to say, like its predecessors, Dhamaal 4 is about a bunch of bumbling oafs whose greed gets the better of them at every turn. A prelude fronted by an AI-created likeness of Jackie Shroff provides a backstory of a pirate named Shaitaan Singh and a massive treasure trove hidden on an unnamed island under two mountain peaks that resemble the letter M.
M is for money, somebody says. The letter also stands for musibat (calamity), intones another character. The film is that and much worse. Manic can be entertaining. Even perhaps moronic. But messy and muddled? No way.
On a pirate ship in the high seas, the leader of the gang, Adhoora (Ravi Kishan), is in search of a map that will lead him to the treasure island. The man who is in possession of the century-old cartograph is Prithvi (Upendra Limaye). The latter ends up on the vessel. So does Guddu. In the melee that ensues, the boat goes up in flames.
Guddu is in love with Alia (Esha Gupta), a widow with two young children. He must earn the approval of the kids before he can hope to become part of the family. Along with his sidekick, Johnny (Sanjay Mishra), and the two children, he sets out in quest of the buried riches.
It is meant to be a “bonding trip” aimed at dispelling the mistrust between Guddu and Alia’s son and daughter but the latter’s attempts to mollycoddle them into submission backfires.
Also chasing the same treasure are Lallan and his new bride Paaro (Anjali Anand) – a character who is constantly fat-shamed and the writers think that is funny – and the trio of Adi, his mishap-prone Manav and former’s estranged wife Rosy (Sanjeeda Shaikh).
Here too, there is a major trust deficit between the siblings and the lady who is done with them. The slim prospect of a rapprochement recedes with every dalliance with danger that they must endure.
As a hot air balloon runs into rough weather – does that sum up the film, too? – and two boats steer their way into trouble as dark clouds hover over them, the treasure hunt gathers momentum. Speaking of momentum, that is an attribute that Dhamaal 4 has no dearth of because it is always a higgledy-piggledy vehicle that flies in the face of any semblance of restraint.
As for the characters, they all end up on the island but no sooner do they lay their hands on the glittering jewels than more trouble erupts in the form of Adhoora and his gang of pirates. Everybody has some skin in the game. The film goes into another mindless loop. Dangers multiply for everybody and the film begins to make less and less sense.
As Dhamaal 4 makes its scrappy and screechy way to an anything-goes climax, the film’s rough-and-ready aesthetic – is the word apt for a film such as this? – creaks under the weight of the outrageously hammy performances (not a single actor has the option of looking for a different, less febrile comic register), wild and weird one-liners, and loud, imbecilic situations that careen out of control all too frequently.
Here is a rider: may the film and its makers know something that we don’t and that there are takers for the unbridled nonsense that Dhamaal 4 rides on. And, to end, a friendly warning: go in with your eyes open and your brains on standby if you must!
 stays afloat long enough to give the audience anything to crack up over.){kind=link}