Give a pat on the back to the Toaster team for a crisp slice of laugh, though not buttered well enough to melt on bite. Director Vivek Daschaudary has some laughs up his sleeve, but like most of our comedies, the wit eventually whittles down to an embarrassing, deadened, as exhausted and incombustible as Archana Puran Singh’s split-personality character, who simply gives up the fight at the end, as though she decided she had had enough.
Quite frankly, so did I. Toaster starts on a funny note. A man so miserly he redefines the concept of penny-pinching. But then the screenplay (Parveez Shaikh, Akshat Ghildial, Anagh Mukherjee) goes South with the miser’s exploits turning into a maelstrom of misery , and that includes non-consensual sex with a blackmailing ‘Aunty’ played with a full-blooded tenacity by Archana Puran Singh. She seems to have fun. I am not sure about others.
There are some interesting actors here, doing what could be seen as the screen version of heavy lifting in a screenplay that just won’t take itself seriously enough. Farah Khan, as the in-charge at an orphanage, behaves exactly like she does in her videos with her cook. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in a film that constantly reminds us of the one-line jogs and giggly gags on YouTube.
Not that Rajkummar Rao’s kanjoos act is not fun. He brings a whole lot of self-deprecatory humour to his parsimonious part, especially in the initial interludes which are far more amusing than the later screentime which mutates into a laborious mirth of little worth.
Abhishek Banerjee, normally a resourceful actor, is here reduced to playing an unanchored boozard. The lengthy, tedious “joke” about his dead mother (an uncharacteristically listless Seema Pahwa) ’s constipation ceases to be humorous even before it takes off. Toilet humour isn’t quite the appetizer in a Rajkummar Rao comedy.
The funniest character and performance comes from Naman Arora as the appliance salesman. Here is an actor whose comic timing needs to be explored fully. Some of the other characters are potentially interesting, but never manage to get beyond the one-note plot about a miser and his attempts to retrieve his toaster.
Rao is in fine form. However Sanya Malhotra as his nonplussed wife struggles in an underwritten part.
The film’s end-credits pay a homage to Asha Bhosle and her sensuous vocal moves in an awfully rendered version of ‘Husn ke laakhon rang’ from Johnny Mera Naam, where the actress on screen (Padma Khanna) had performed a striptease. The film does just the opposite: it titivates its titters cumbersomely as it progresses.
