Dhoom Dhaam Movie Review — Sucharita Tyagi
Mainstream Hindi cinema ki sthiti iss waqt aisi hai ki koi film dekhte huye agar kuch interesting craft work ya subplot miley, my first instinct is to check ki yeh remake hai ya original?
Aaj waali turns out is an original, but is it fresh?
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Desi shaadiyon mein chaos hona hi hona hai, arranged marriage ho toh aur hona hai, and Bollywood shaadi ho toh MAIN conflict hai is desi-arranged marriage mein husband aur wife ki incompatibility. Toh iss template ke lena, and turning it into a heist-y/rom-com hybrid PLUS setting it in one Mumbai night is a concept I can 100% get behind.
Yami Gautam hai Koyal and Pratik Gandhi hai Veer. Inka rishta pakka hua hai, chat mangni patt byaah style. But KUCH toh chal raha hai, Koyal is TOO happy when her parents saying how sushil and agyaakari and patriarchy ki foot soldier she is, and Veer, who doesn’t seem very vir at all, is grimacing as his parents narrate the story of him getting into a fistfight with a gunda. Koi toh kuch chhipa raha hai, jhooth ki baas screen se aajaaye nikal ke baahar. There is also a quick flashback to a seemingly disconnected south Bombay robbery, kuch nakaab posh logon ne hard cash churaaya barsaati bambai ki ek raat. In dulha Dulhan mein se koi chor toh nahi? Mukul Chadda has shown up, and I'm excited, is this finally the silly and fun comedy that’ll inspire a long review about the need for silly and fun comedy?
Alas, not.
The great set-up, has too many targets in sight, and in an attempt to hit them all, despite the linear and compact screenplay, the race to the finish line is a tonal zig-zag, a round-about, a spiral, a drunk scribble, anything but the coherent caper it promised to be.
Pratik Gandhi’s Veer is this mild-mannered, slightly chomu guy with vertigo, claustrophobia, and a desperate need to follow rules. But when it comes down to it, he isn’t above throwing a punch or two, thanks to courage he draws from a Bruce Lee poster on his bedroom wall. He may not be able to dance at his own engagement party, but if needed, a striptease in front of horny middle aged aunties, isn’t entirely out of the question. It’s not that none of this is interesting or engaging, all of it IS, and Pratik Gandhi is as fine a performer as any, it’s just that unlike Kunal Khemu’s ‘Madgaon Express’, Rishab Seth’s comedy characters just don't cross over from cringe into actual slapstick. The dialogue holding them back is banal, sometimes appearing to be written in English translated to Hindi “lagta hai inka doggie tumhe like karne laga hai”, and the attention to detail required to create a lived-in universe is severely lacking. Yami Gautam’s Koyal who conveniently knows how to fight without any setup or explanation, also conveniently spends much of the film running around in a convenient magical length-changing lehenga, sneakers kabhi visible, kabhi not.
Much like the protagonists of this film, the little scenes through the night, each with a different set-up, do not fit together seamlessly. See, yeh kahaani poori ek raat mein hoti hai aur yeh raat is divided into a collection of scenes — a fight with two people handcuffed together, a kind Muslim chowkidar apni biwi se nicker karta hua, CGI fireworks observed from an under construction building, a dilapidated factory mein show down, and that strip club I mentioned earlier. The film is SO taken by how cool and “Cinematic” all these “moments” and these settings are, the moments themselves remain rhythmically disconnected. One of the Dhoom Dhaam’s major weaknesses is it’s the lack of urgency required for it to actually turn into the fast paced crime thriller it aims to be. There are IDEAS of how COOL certain sequences can potentially look, without a concerted effort to stitch them into a feature film. The film clearly wants to be clever, but *shrug*.
It doesn’t help ki beech beech mein chalte phirte ruk jaate hain, pausing for sermons, pace jaaye tel lene — maa-baap ki jaan khatre mein hain bhai, yahaan sadak par khade hokar feminism par ted-talk insert karni ABHI zaroori hai? Gaadi bhagaate huye suna lena? Ya nahaa dho kar time nikaal lenge na baad mein, abhi thoda gundo se bach lo!
Marriage, individuality, compatibility, corruption, aur traditional gender roles par uchhal uchhal kar koodti phaandti yeh film only reinforces 1 thing — Pratik Gandhi has great comic timing. Considering we already know that thanks to a recent funny film I’ve already mentioned once in this review, THIS film truly has nothing fresh to offer.
So, on a scale of 1 to 10, Dhoom Dhaam is….7–8 special thanks appear as the end credits begin to roll, sabse oopar is Sima Taparia. Did they shoot a scene together? What happened to it? That unanswered question might be the most intriguing thing about this movie. Netflix par hai, aap dekh kar bataao.
