Deepak Shivdasani’s Mr Black Mr White has one major problem — it was released in the wrong era.
Had the film been released during the era of black-and-white films, it would still have had a chance of working.
Today’s comedies are innovative with well-written, situational humour or, at least, witty one-liners and gags.
Mr Black Mr White takes a regressive approach with its predictable content and age-old, clichéd Bollywood sequences.
Sadly, you find it difficult to smile throughout the film and that is not good news for a comedy.
Not again!
Gopi (Suniel Shetty), a village bumpkin, comes to Goa in search of Kishen (Arshad Warsi) to return a piece of land to him.
Kishen makes a living as a conman and dreams of getting his sister educated and married.
How many times have we seen such sibling emotions before? If that’s not enough, we have a poor little rich girl (Anishka Khosla) who falls in love with Gopi.
The reason being, of course, Gopi saves her from goons and is not that smart in the matters of the heart.
Kishen, too, has a ladylove (Rashmi Nigam) and he manages to fool her by pretending to have a twin brother.
Adding to the confusion are a host of characters — a confused cop (Sarath Saxena), a crazy don called Laadla (Ashish Vidhyarthi), who turns weepy at the slightest provocation, and a trio of scantily clothed female thieves pursuing stolen diamonds.
The opening scene takes you by surprise with its stylised action sequences — desi version of Charlie’s Angels. But after that, the film makes you want to leave the hall as soon as possible.
It appears that Shivdasani has assembled a bunch of buffoons and lets them loose in Goa.
However, the scene where Laadla’s mother dies stands out. It is, sort of, a spoof on Bollywood’s clichéd mothers.
You also manage a faint smile at some of Warsi’s scenes and a few genuine efforts by Saxena — but that’s about it.
Shetty’s failure at playing the lead can be exemplified by his performance in this film.
Gets worse
Warsi goes about his job in a routine manner but does try to infuse some life in the film.
Khosla looks like a bad copy of Preity Zinta and the less said about Nigam, the better.
Vidhyarthi is loud and Saxena seems to be the only actor interested in his role.
It is rather sad to see the talented Sandhya Mridul be part of the desi Charlie’s Angels.
The film’s music is pure cacophony and unimaginative choreography doesn’t seem to help.
In fact, this film should go down as a case study on how not to make a comedy, so that film critics, like us, are saved the agony of sitting through such banal humour.
