Bhooth Bangla Review | Akshay Kumar-Priyadarshan’s Juvenile Reunion Shows No Mercy For Audiences

Throughout the near-three-hour-long punishment that is the latest Akshay Kumar vehicle, Bhooth Bangla, I teetered between rage, annoyance and flat-out exhaustion. I felt defeated by a director, who should have just retired (Priyadarshan), hell-bent to pump out one dull joke after another, utterly oblivious to the room. The entitlement in Hindi cinema’s cheerfully dated conception of entertainment never stops being revolting. Held by Kumar, who prances, fights and isn’t as amusingly silly as he can be, Bhooth Bangla is the death of comedy-cum-mythological-cum-horror, or whatever this outlandish genre stew this is. Kumar’s reunion with Priyadarshan after 17 years arrives as a stinker of massive proportions. Watching it in an almost empty theatre, I felt the colossal weight of its sheer dumbness crush me. Sometimes, having fellow sufferers helps to soften the blows.

First, understand the stakes. Your attention has to compete between ridiculous wigs, determined wince-inducing sexual humour and the most synthetic haunted palace. When Arjun (Kumar) lands at his spectacular ancestral estate somewhere in northern India, the courtyard looks more decrepit than its interiors. Even the ruins are carefully designed. Even after an army of staff moves in to tidy up the place and render it presentable for a wedding, not much difference can be found. The wedding in question is of Arjun’s sister, Meera (Mithila Palkar). The groom and his family are big red flags, besides being rabidly superstitious. No wedding preparation can advance until his family astrologer ticks off all the boxes and verifies Meera. Her own wishes and thoughts don’t matter, but, of course, she’s blind to all the dangerous cues.

Before the film can get to the wedding, you have to put up with a chunky first half circling an exasperated Arjun trying to get the mansion all spruced-up and functional. A wedding planner from Delhi (Paresh Rawal), the mansion’s caretaker (Govardhan Asrani) and his nephew-electrician (Rajpal Yadav), who convinces Arjun that he’s lewd, occupy much of this hour’s chaos and deeply unfunny gags. Yadav brings such chipper energy that his efforts to resuscitate the film can almost appear heroic; except that they’re not. They’re just delusional.

The entire first half hunts ways to make Rawal the literal butt of jokes. Something awful keeps happening to his poor posterior—either it catches fire or gets accidentally impaled in countless scenes. Initially, there’s a lot of establishing the run-up to his misery. Priyadarshan gradually tires of it, yet the screenplay, co-written with Rohan Shankar, Abilash Nair and Aakash Kaushik, keeps dishing out variations. Priyadarshan tries to rake nostalgia with his beloved coterie, but the film strongly feels like a disposed residue from the past. When the butt-jokes ebb, the film reverts to sexually vulgar humour, largely and unsurprisingly finding woman’s bodies as its receptacle. Yes, it’s one of those low-hanging films which ostensibly opens with the promise of brides’ safety but spares zero thought before peddling distasteful misogyny.

Assuming you're still with me, the plotting is needlessly convoluted, replete with the tackiest of transformations. The town of Mangalpur is plagued by a mythological curse. No one gets married here. They cross the river to do that. There’s a bloody history of new brides being taken away by a demon. The lurking monster, Vadhusur, whose return hangs over the plot, is in such a preposterous costume with bat-wings you can only sigh. Oh, there’s also a strange machine inside a locked shrine, whose reverse-chants of the shlokas can empower Vadhusur’s invocation.

Introduction of characters is as erratic as their convenient disappearance. Jisshu Sengupta, Arjun’s father (despite being almost a decade younger than Kumar), lectures about duality of man and beast in the start and is re-summoned much later for an overlong backstory, wherein Tabu pops up for few minutes to dance, cry and shriek. Wamiqa Gabbi essays a bewildering constant smiler who has been told to hide news of a family tragedy. Her missing sister was one of the victims of the central demon. But her face carries not even a passing flicker of grief or frustration. Her character is only glad to be ambushed by Arjun, who behaves like a lovesick 13-year-old with her. She pops in for romantic relief and a song or two. Needless to say, these coy cavorting scenes between the pair will just make you recoil. The romance is discarded soon for Kumar to flex his action chops. Mind you, this is a character who, in the first hour, keeps tripping and stumbling. Character consistency: what's that? Bhooth Bangla lurches between disparate tones, its camera spinning in unfathomable directions, insisting you latch on for its no-concession humourless diet.