Another hopeless, lifeless comedy

[1]

There are a lot of things about Bin Bulaye Barati that make you pity the filmmaker, who seems to have approved scenes that start and end nowhere; the producer for having put his money into a project that is definitely not going to make any profits; the actors who wish to make a comeback in Bollywood, but who at the end of the first week, will find themselves in an awkward spot.

And it makes me feel sadder for the audiences who will actually pay to sit through this hopelessly obvious to-the-core situational comedy.
Now, let me elaborate why I feel so. Firstly, director Chandrakant Singh fails to give the film a solid start. Characters pop out of nowhere, things happen without any logical explanation — and guess what, the director expects you to laugh at that. Did I say laugh? Yes! Hahahaha! But Chandrakant’s miseries don’t end here. There are lots of scenes where even a novice would have said, “Cut! We’ve got to do it again”. But Chandrakant seems to think differently.
Secondly, the dialogues lack the punch you expect in a comedy. The jokes are no better than what the so-called new breed of popular comedy reality TV shows have been force-feeding the Indian audiences with — a type of comedy where a certain Archana Puran Singh laughs at just anything. And if you happen to be the audience, well, you will laugh too, but here you are laughing to bring down your misery.
There seems to be no major problem in the script, except a few instances where you wonder if the writers were smart enough to write that, or they actually believed the audiences are dumb enough not to see their gaffles — a particular scene for example shows how Aftab Shivdasani and company find a bag of jewels, which originally belonged to the main villain — King Cobra (Gulshan Grover). He wears some fancy costume, which makes him look more like a joker than the Gabbar of Madhavgad he claims to be. A lot of the scenes in the film look like they’ve been ripped off other recent hits or classics — and the lack of originality only leaves you more disgruntled.
Speaking of acting, Aftab Shivdasani comes across as a wannabe Chulbul Pandey, with the moustache, his smile and a huge body, where flab is mistaken for muscles. And Priyanka Kothari is nothing more than a dumb girlfriend whose job is to look pretty and state the obvious. All major actors Om Puri, Gulshan, Johnny Lever, including the lead actors Aftab and Priyanka, fail to impress.
If Bin Bulaye Barati has any saving grace, it’s the actors in supporting roles. Rajpal Yadav, Sanjay Mishra and Vijay Raj take the cake. Their combination is not just hilarious but generates most of the serious rib-tickling laughs. And well, of course Shweta Tiwari as the seductress trying to woo the trio to find out the location of a bag of jewels comes across as far stronger a character than that of Priyanka Kothari in her 20-30 minute cameo. Her item number Dil ka achar dalogi comes across as a better number than Mallika Sherawat’s Shallu ke thumke.
In the entire film, the best camerawork is evident in the item numbers, right from the beginning to the end, and not in the scenes where the real story unfolds. Which is indeed very disappointing!