Total Dhamaal
2019 · Directed by Indra Kumar
Original language: Hindi
- comedy
- adventure
The story
Con-artists Guddu and Johnny, a bickering couple Avinash and Bindu who are on a verge of divorce, a fireman Lallan and his side-kick siblings Adi and Manav and a cunning police commissioner set out on a mad chase for a hidden booty of Rs 50 crores in a zoo in Janakpur.
What it’s like
Bright, saturated studio color and broad, sun-lit set pieces give this Bollywood ensemble comedy the glossy, overlit feel of a big-budget Diwali release, with fast cutting, whip pans and exaggerated zooms during slapstick chases through a zoo and sprawling streets. The sound is loud and busy: brassy dhol-driven score, cartoonish sound effects and rapid-fire Hindi-English banter that rarely lets the room go quiet. The mood is breezy, chaotic and cheerfully greedy, with a light caper energy and a running undercurrent of pure money-hunting excitement. Its emotional register stays on the surface: a bickering married couple drifting toward separation and a set of mismatched sidekicks are knocked together by the chaos, and the affection between them comes across through quick, broad gestures rather than quiet scenes. Pacing is relentless, with few breathing spaces between gags, songs and pratfalls. Violence is slapstick and cartoonish, with lots of falls, collisions and mock-peril, and no gore; there is some crude and suggestive humour and it is loud rather than sensual. For people who want a noisy, silly, heist-flavoured comedy to laugh along to with friends, with no need for subtlety.
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