That Bollywood is starving of a good comedy is no breaking news. Between ‘strictly adult’ tagged sex comedies and the 
slapstick ones, it’s been a while since we’ve had a good clean laugh-out-loud film. With the promos look as promising as ‘Bajatey Raho’ did, does the movie deliver as promised?
When her bank employee husband dies after being wrongly framed for a fraud, Mrs Baweja aka Mummyji (Dolly Ahluwalia) vows to get revenge from his corrupt boss Sabharwal (Ravi Kissan). Her accomplices in this grand scheme are her cable-guy son Sukhi (Tusshar Kapoor), his friend Ballu (Ranvir Shorey), family friend Mintoo (Vinay Pathak) and Sukhi’s girlfriend Manpreet (Vishakha Singh).
Touted as a revenge comedy, directed by ‘Challo Dilli fame is that dish in the restaurant, which is conveniently available, only fancifully rechristened and garnished with versions of the same spices. The likeness in the narrative, one of commoners getting even with a morally stripped shrewd businessman has nothing exciting to write home about. Then you wonder if there is anything in the way it is done that sets it apart, but as hard as you try there is nothing extraordinary there either. Because it’s a Delhi based movie, we are subject to every known cliché that Yash Raj’s and Kashyap’s have put together from boisterous dialogues deliveries, to slang vocabs to elaborate farmhouse shaadis to caricatured characters et al
Where usually casting is based on the script’s requirement, here it seems that the director got a bunch of genre champs together and wrote a story around their strengths. So everyone religiously goes about doing what they’re good or atleast famous for. Dolly Ahluwalia, a natural puts an act exactly as you would expect of her, as do Vinay Pathak and Ranvir Shorey who’ve earned their credibility via similar roles in Bheja Fry or Chalo Dilli. Ravi Kissan plays the crooked villain and Tusshar well, hovers around. Vishakha Singh adds a refreshing touch and a worthy mention to Brijendra Kala as the villain’s wing-man, but in the conundrum, they’re all off key not helping much to prop the movie.
The set-up is as simple as it comes; unfortunately the very minimalism cripples the film. Not even sure if I can say this is one of those movies that possibly looked good on paper. If you erased off your memory for a bit, there were moments but the writer’s anxiety to make the story different from past con capers peeks thru and you see thru it. The slight shot to pick up pace with cheeky interludes and songs doesn’t work.
