There should be a way to get unhinged Ranveer Singh performances without having to see Rohit Shetty films. Singh is not as effective here as Simmba, where he threatened us with a good time before the film collapsed on itself. But even in Cirkus—a considerably worse film—his exertions are something to hang on to (at least in the first half, after which he seems to run out of gas). When his voice goes high and his body arranges itself at weird angles, he’s more a Looney Tunes creation than a flesh-and-blood actor. It’s a pity no one can encourage his natural silliness the way Shetty does, for no Hindi director makes films that are more determinedly, defiantly stupid.
Cirkus begins in the 1940s, with a doctor (Murali Sharma) out to
prove, for some reason, that upbringing matters more than bloodlines. As an
experiment, he interchanges babies between two pairs of twins at an orphanage
who are up for adoption. Both sets of brothers are named Roy and Joy by their
new parents, circus-owners in Ooty and a wealthy couple in Bangalore. Ooty Roy
develops his own circus act—‘the electric man’—in which he joins exposed wires
on stage (a childhood accident has made him immune to electric current).
Bangalore Roy is trying to woo heiress Bindu (Jacqueline Fernandez) without
running afoul of her status-obsessed dad (Sanjay Mishra). I wish I could tell
you something useful about the two Joys, but they’re just… there.
Bollywood rules dictate that separated twins must feel some unexplained
connection that precedes their meeting. Thus, the electricity that courses
through one Roy turns the other into a livewire, though he doesn’t know why.
Naturally, a large part of the film is extended scenes of both Roys
electrocuting people. It’s funny the first time and maybe the second, but after
a dozen attempts you’ll start to wonder if actual electrocution is a worse fate
than watching something this juvenile.
After the Bangalore Roy and Joy turn up in Ooty, the film becomes a series
of mistaken sightings. Shetty doesn’t bother distinguishing the twins, which
would've at least given Singh and Varun Sharma a chance to show some comic
versatility. Both sets of brothers look, sound and act exactly the same. Both
families live in mansions. Maybe that’s why the twins don’t meet till the very
end: the viewer would barely be able to tell them apart.
It seems almost cruel to bring up RK/RKay in the same breath as Cirkus—one
of the year's best and a leading contender for the worst. But Cirkus forces
that comparison on itself by attempting to reference and pastiche ‘50s and ‘60s
Hindi cinema. So you get songs from that era (‘Aao Twist Karein’, ‘Babu Samjho
Ishaare’) used as comic filler and Mishra talking like Dev Anand crossed with
Ajit crossed with David. It’s depressingly unimaginative—especially in a year
where several Hindi films have made witty use of old songs.
After Singh gives up the ghost, the film becomes a purgatory of bad
slapstick and recurring gags. Pooja Hegde, as Ooty Roy's wife, tries to play it
straight. Shetty regular Siddhartha Jadhav shrieks and mugs gratingly as a
criminal with a Little Richard bouffant. Deepika Padukone turns up, presumably
to ask her husband what he was thinking when he signed the film, and hurries
off after a forgettable dance number. The only performance with some wit is
Vrajesh Hirjee’s sinister auto driver. It apparently took four writers—Farhad
Samji, Sanchit Bedre, Vidhi Ghodgaonkar and Yunus Sajawal—to come up with
‘bulbul, hit me’ as the English translation of ‘aa bail mujhe maar’. And
that’s the best joke.
I foolishly assumed a film called Cirkus might actually be interested
in the workings or even the nostalgia of travelling circuses. But that would
involve actual effort, research, thought put into design. So much easier to not
have any characters apart from Roy and Joy who work in the circus. Similarly,
why bother trying to figure out what Ooty and Bangalore might have looked like
in the ‘60s when you can have sets that look like an Archies comic threw
up?
Any such complaints will be dismissed by Shetty and team as the griping of
elitist snobs. You see, they make films for real viewers—mass films,
family films. I can picture one such unit out to see Cirkus: mom dozing
off; dad bored out of his skull, wondering why he insisted on a family outing;
daughter busy on Instagram; son making plans to watch Avatar again. No
filmmaker working today has made a virtue out of doing less.
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