REVIEW: Dil Toh Baccha Hai JiTRULY CHILDISH
I've never been a fan of Madhur Bhandarkar's cinema. While he's displayed some narrative skills in Chandni Bar, Satta and Page 3 (unlike most Hindi filmmakers), his productions have always been sub-par and the casting (barring the lead actors), often inappropriate. Also, his formula of telling industry-based stories -- politics, big business, fashion etc -- is now wearing thin. Which perhaps explains his foray into mindless comedy with Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji.
It's a lazily put together film and this shows in just about every department.
Ajay Devgan, Emraan Hashmi and Omi Vaidya are three bachelors (Ajay's character is on the brink of a divorce, although the cause and the manner in which it's handled is as flimsy as the rest of the film) on the lookout to find suitable girls. They share an apartment -- because Ajay has to move out of his marital home and into his spacious parental house with nobody for company. He puts in an ad for paying guests and gym instructor and serial womaniser Emraan (by now it's established that there's only one kind of role he can play convincingly and hence the only kind he usually gets) and Omi, who works for a marriage bureau and writes terrible poetry on the side, apply.
Ajay gets attracted to a young intern in his office (Shazahn Padamsee, grating on nerves), Emraan scores by the score before slowing down somewhat to be toy boy to rich socialite Tisca Chopra (the only interesting character in the film) while Omi (with a peculiar American twang explained as acquired after spending four years in England!) woos radio jockey Gunjan who clearly isn't interested in this latter day Amol Palekar and his corny couplets.
But boys will be boys and they persist, although there's nothing funny about anything that happens to them. DTBHJ would have worked had they actually written an outright sex comedy, or then a sensitive appraisal of the plight of clueless men in a world where women have clearly moved ahead of their stereotypical positions. The women characters are let down by bad casting, the male by bad writing.
And what's with all the creepy homophobia?
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