Badass Ravi Kumar, It Will Take Civilization Centuries To  Get Over This One

Rating: 0 stars

After  sitting  dutifully through this monstrous melange of  mindlessness and crassness, I  am convinced the medley of lobotomized  mayhem -–a sort of Animal without the sass, the impunity, basic intelligence  and  Ranbir Kapoor—is put together  by  a bunch of  blind dimwits. Blind… Because they cannot see the  script for what it is: mentally challenged. Dimwitted…  Because….well…Badass Ravi Kumar could not be considered  the handiwork of normal sensible  minds.

It takes  herculean efforts to make  a  film so terrible that  you  just keep watching to see how  much worse  it gets.

It is  neither  self-referential   enough to be considered a spoof on the formulistic conventions  of  Hindi mainstream cinema  of  the  1970s  nor  “cool” enough to be  designated a  cartoon strip in motion picture format.

It is , to use some unparliamentary  language,as  fuck-all  as  cinema can be. Perhaps, I am only saying perhaps, Himesh Reshammiya has  the right to indulge himself  first as  singer then as  an actor, when in fact he is not  much of either. As expected he ‘sings’  his  way through numerous  nasal numbers some of which have him dancing with Sunny Leone.

Ms  Leone plays a character named Nisha  who dies midway and then  resurfaces at the climax for a protracted  song and  dance  presentation which goes from  being a  disco thumping eyesore to a cacophonic Qawwali to some Sufiana concoction….at the end  of it, I felt  as battered as  the fishermen in the turbulent waters of Thandel.

The  other  major female  character is  Laila played gratingly by Kirti Kulhari.  Laila is  a terrible person: she has short hair, she  shows thigh and cleavage, she smokes  and when all fails  she  slithers up and down  Prabhu Deva  hoping things would get hard for  him.

Ironically,  Himesh does  all the dancing while Indian cinema’s  most expert dancer  prances around  mouthing the absurdest limericks on  this  side  of psychedelia.Everyone seems to be  high on banned drugs.

Weirdly ,everyone  speaks in rhyme, which is  not a crime. But the lines are  so cheesy, they feel greasy.

Himesh, who thinks  his fans   love him, would be a bit  embarrassed to know that there were only seven people in  the  theatre this evening and four of them were with me.  Where were the  ostensible  lakhs of  people who had reportedly  bought the tickets in advance  booking? What are we doing to the movie experience and to the  boxoffice  by putting up seriously fudged numbers, pretending that the  vile-product is  a sell-out when the is only a a trickle  of spectators inside,  paying for  reviews that  are sinfully  orchestrated ….

Most  important of all, how  could  a product as  putrid and mortifying as Badass Ravi Kumar feature  actors like Pavan Malhotra, Kirti Kulhari , Prashant Narayanan and Prabhu Deva making a complete fool of themselves? Johnny Lever and Sanjay Mishra are meant to be impersonating the  two great actors Ashok Kumar and Pran, respectively. Lever’s Ashok Kumar lands with a thud. Mishra’s Pran  is lost in translation.

The same is true of the film. Director Keith Gomes must have been briefed  to make  a fun retro-film. He , for no fault of his, gives  the longest and most punchline-free  joke in the  history of  Hindi cinema.As for  apna Himesh, his performance  is lost under the  long hair , beard and aviators  he wears even in the swimming pool.