Joker Review

This is a joke on the audience. You now know why the likes of Akshay and Sonakshi stayed away from promoting the most embarrassing outing of their career. As my adolescent daughter would say, there is not a shred of sanity in the film. This is not comedy. Not a spoof. It is some fatalistic indulgence by a person who has no clue of what he can chew but goes about the bite without discretion.
One late night Agastya (Akshay) informs his live in friend Diva (Sonakshi) that he is heading nowhere with his research project on a radio connect with the aliens. At work next morn, he is ticked off by the money-bags and told that he is to come up with results in a month or face the sack. Diva tells him that he has received a call from ‘back home’ where hid dad is dying. The two pack up and leave for India and to this village Pagalpur a piece of land which no one wants to own up and is so forsaken that you have to lure even the auto guy to take you there. It is supposedly the insane capital. At Pagalpur Agastya realizes that his father is fine and the telephone message was a panicky call t save the village from economic disaster. Since our guy has been working on aliens, he morphs a story that would attract the media a la Peepli Live. The media arrives in hordes. An old rival catches up with Agastya and calls the bluff. However in the mean while the myopic politician and the hungry media have come to the village and made their exaggerations. The bluff called, the police too arrive to arrest Agastya. In a miraculous moment, the alien arrives and the village gets oil rich.
The film is a pathologically faulty. It is not an indulgence by a moneybag with the right contacts on the right side of the screen. It is an outright insult and a consistent onslaught on your intelligence. It is not just logic defying but also grammar denying. The filmmaker Story/Editing/Lyrics/Direction (Shirish Kunder) takes you through a revolving door. You know not whether you are coming or going. So is it with the stars. Disorder, chaos and mayhem are the planetary influences on the film that seeks the alien. Even the premise is based on flaws. The execution is an inexcusable product that has lost its marbles and threaten to leave you craving for relief. From being juvenile it refuses to draw the line between the insane and the delinquent. The assemble of stars including the likes of the extremely talented Shreyas Talpade, Asrani, Sanjay Mishra, Darsheel are all grasping for breadth and giving you company in this suffocation in the name of cinema. The tragedy hidden in this comedy is that the stars bring in a lot of effort and sincerity. The director has got it all wrong. Conceptually and on the table it may have sounded fine. So lost is it in execution that the resultant product is not about the inmates of an asylum, but the creation of an inmate. In the name of entertainment, you feel you have been attacked and abused.
And yes, the film establishes that compared to the filmmaker Shirish Kunder, his more popular spouse is a Ray or a Raj Kapoor. If you value your sanity, if you do not want to be caught heaving and sighing and if you want to avoid being shouted at by the persons you got along with you to the movie house, stay way.
L. Ravichander.