Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos
Starring Vir Das, Mona Singh, Sharib Hashmi, Mithila Parker, Aamir Khan, and Imran Khan
Written and Directed by Vir Das
Admittedly, Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos , Aamir Khan’s latest venture into a universe where no man has gone before, is a crazy, crazy joyride into a world where goofiness is not an eccentricity, it is the norm, and where ‘Main tumko chodna nahin chahta’ definitely doesn’t mean, ‘I don’t want to leave you.’
This absolutely madcap satire opens with a shootout where Aamir Khan, as a bewigged spaced-out gangster with the hangdog look of a prized bullfighter who has just been told his salary is on hold, gets killed. This is not a spoiler alert: it is an alert for Aamir fans not to miss the beginning.
The rest of the zanily zigzaggy screenplay (Vir Das, Amogh Ranadive) is what you make of it. No apologies for the exacerbated raunchy humour with lots of linguistic sloppiness, courtesy Vir Das who plays the adopted son of two British gay gangsters.
You want to start counting how many degrees of separation Vir’s Happy Patel suffers from his Indian roots? By the time he reaches into his ‘Hindustani’ pedigree, the narration has all but lost control, peaking into the summits of wackiness with a climax where Vir defeats the villain with a blend of cooking and ballet dancing, with images of Bollywood’s best dance-romance moments playing in the background.
Oh, forgot to tell you, the archvillain is a Goan culinary catastrophe whom everyone calls Mama. She loves to make cutlets and feed them to her army of hooligans. That Mama is played by Mona Singh is just that stroke of luck that this kookie escapade into the funny farm needed. Singh makes the best of a role that requires her to snarl at Vir’s Happy when her clammy arms finally get to him.
There is lots of deliciously driven drollery here, not all of which lands. The plot seems in a hurry to make its jokes as fast as possible, with the result that we often don’t get an opportunity to savour one gag before the next one shows up, clamouring for our attention.
There is a sweet romance tucked away in the comic chaos between Vir and Mithila Parker, who plays a one-note item girl whose movements are restricted to a set step every time. The joke about foot-swirling frozenness gets tiresome by overuse.
Everyone is trying to be funny all the time, even when they are not trying; they are meant to be funny, which is like having pizza for dinner every night. There is this chorus of singers so out of tune, they are used as torture for Mama’s victims. There is this old waiter who walks to the table so slowly, the coffee reaches the patron three days after it is ordered. There is the onrunning joke about the NRI hero pronouncing ‘Tum’ as ‘Tom’; each time this happens a guy called Tom materializes on screen.
Ha ha.
Although we really can’t take the stand-up out of Vir Das, he is a hoot as Happy Patel, the lost Brit trying to find his bearings in Goa while being chased by a coterie of goons. Indeed, the subtitles which elaborate on Vir’s crazy Hindi are the real star. They, the subtitles, voice the innuendoes that we may miss in Vir’s dialogues.
For all its follies of exaggerated burlesque, Happy Patel is a wickedly funny expedition into blunderland, not as funny as Aamir, Imran, and Vir’s Delhi Belly. But a lot funnier than what masquerades as mirth in our movies. Aur main choot nahin bola raha hoon.
