Aa Gaya Hero Review: Goodbye, Govinda, It Once Was Fun

Directed by: Dipankar Senapati

Rating: 0 stars

Dear Govinda,

I went through the singular experience of watching  your latest film touted as your comeback, but severely savaged by critics as being too ‘1990s’ to be taken seriously now . In  case you didn’t notice, it is 2017. But when critics say Aa Gaya Hero is too ‘1990s’ I don’t know what they mean… Because even in the 1990s your films made by your friends like Pahlaj Nihalani and David Dhawan looked like they came 30 years too late.

Lekin chalo, those films back then like Shola Aur Shabnam and Hero No 1 were fun, if you liked that sort of a thing…thrusting pelvis, double meaning comebacks etc etc.Now the pelvis doesn’t thrust. It thirsts.

There was the inimitable and remarkably witty Kader Khan for company back then. Alas Kader Khan is no more a part of  your journey. Bichde sabhi baari baari.The wit is gone.All you’re left with is the vulgarity. In a scene in Aa Gaya Hero(Here Comes The Hero???!!!) I was aghast to see the theatre stalwart MakarandDeshpande saying something as sleazy as—and I translate loosely—“When you grow older what goes up in your younger days  stays down.”

I am pretty sure that was Makarand, though I could be hallucinating.I also think I saw Poonam Pandey in one shot. I have no  idea what she was doing with you,or why she was doing what she was doing/not doing. This film had that effect on me. It is like  a lengthy disjointed incoherent tawdry and tacky homage to the honest-cops sagas of the 1970s executed by someone high on dope and low on hope .

Aa Gaya Hero could pass off as  a spoof on Prakash Mehra’s Zanjeerand Govind Nihalani’s Ardh Satya , if only the director(where did you find him???) had the sense of humour to carry off a satirical look-see at the khakhi genre. You know, how Dead Pool spoofs the super-hero films?   The only entity Aa Gaya Hero ends up ridiculing is you,Govinda, once a star now reduced to  a pale pathetic shadow of what you once used to be.

The swagger of Sarkayee lo khatiya is  replaced by a grotesque parody of the funny-entertaining hero who once was King.Who IS this impersonator  on screen? And what is he doing  in this  pathetic patchwork quilt of a product, parody that parodies the parodicGovinda film of the 1990s,  with gaping holes and ongoing continuity lapses . Clearly the editor has used a  butcher’s knife on the footage,  not knowing what to cut because it was all so messy?

Where is the real Govinda?  Why has he allowed this charlatan to  take over? If I was you, Govinda, I would  slap a defamation suit against the people responsible for this hideous travesty.

Nobody must do this to Govinda. Not even Govinda.