Useless. This is perfect adjective to describe Hello Darling. I walked out of the cinema after watching this Manoj Tiwari directed, Subhash Ghai supported flick asking myself, “What was that about?” And it hurts even more because after a long debate about Bollywood Chick Flicks, the cast, namely Celina Jaitly, Gul Panag and Eesha Koppikhar all got on top buildings claiming their Hello Darling was just that. In all honesty, Hello Darling is bad cinema at its worst. If you like sleazy Bollywood films that speak shamelessly about sex (read: Tom, Dick and Harry and Kya Kool Hai Hum), then Hello Darling is entertaining. However, for the majority of us who prefer not to indulge in the sleaze-genre, would definitely regard Hello Darling a dud.
Mansi (Gul Panag), Candy (Celina Jaitly) and Satvati (Eesha Koppikar) are not only friends but co-workers. To make their corporate lifestyle a tad bit more exciting, the girls are joined by their sleazy boss (Javed Jaffery) who is bored with his homely wife (Divya Dutta). Naturally, he looks for every opportunity and reason to hit on his female employees. However, the ladies realize that enough is enough and decide to teach their leachy boss a hard lesson. Amidst the chaos is apparently a story which is supposed to make you laugh; something about an erroneous identity, a murder, an unknown body and pretty much some nonsense which make up this so-called comedy.
So basically, Hello Darling is nothing short of a film that makes you want to puke. You want to vomit at the script and story because you cannot believe that Manoj Tiwari, a well-known actor in the Bhojpuri film industry, would even think that such a film would work. Slapstick doesn’t cut it in Bollywood and while Hello Darling is indeed slapstick, it also sits on the fence of being stupid and borderline foolish. My personal understanding of the subject is that the director was actually trying to put a fun spin on a topic that occurs on a daily basis: perverted bosses. However, it just doesn’t work. The lines are OTT and corny. Hello Darling is dumb all over. And if I try to even look for scenes that make me laugh, yeah, impossible.
Performance wise, each of the actresses deserve awards; awards for hamming that is. It is impossible to say which one outdid the next simply because they each were beyond terrible. Gul Panag tries too hard; Celina Jaitly as usual exposes and does nothing else; Eesha is hardly the Haryana girl in a big city type. Yeap, incorrectly casted. Javed Jaffrey overacts while Divya Dutta looks lost. Chunky Pandey hangs around and lastly, Sunny Deol is a misfit.
Hello Darling tries too hard. And fails.
