Do you want to see Aftab Shivdasani and Vivek Oberoi in drag, kissing? Do you want to see Aftab Shivdasani and Vivek Oberoi at all? Do you find rape jokes funny? Do you consider Indra Kumar a master of the cinematic medium? If the answer to any of the above is yes, our advice is still as follows: avoid Grand Masti like it’s done you personal harm. Because if you do see it, you’ll feel like it has.
Shivdasani, Oberoi and Riteish Deshmukh play three husbands who, to put it plainly, aren’t getting any and are very upset about it. The obvious solution – obvious to screenwriters Milap Zaveri and Tushar Hiranandani, at any rate – is to send them off for a college reunion where they can take revenge on their wives for putting offspring, household and career before sex-on-demand. That’s about it for plot – what follows is less a story, more a series of demented, depraved ravings culminating in a scene where Pradeep Rawat’s character can only be saved from falling off a roof by his daughter, wife and sister stripping off and using their clothes to form a rope.
You have to wonder why Kumar is still being allowed to direct anything longer than a public service announcement. In the ’90s, he made some of the shrillest Hindi films ever (Dil, Ishq); lately, he seems to be trying hard to make the stupidest. Is fashioning the wreckage that is the collective career of Oberoi, Shivdasani and Deshmukh into a mountain of double entendre a fulfilling job? We might never know – though it’s interesting how much of Grand Masti’s humour revolves around castration. During the course of the film, various appendages are attacked by cats, pecked by crows, scalded by soup and chopped off by axes. In Freudian terms, maybe this is a manifestation of Kumar’s powerlessness, after two decades in the business, to make a decent film.
This review appeared in Time Out Delhi.
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