Cirkus Is The Year-end Reminder Of 2002’s  Waterloo

Cirkus

Rating: ½ star

Just how awful is  Cirkus? Hard  to measure mediocrity  of  this level. It is   like asking, how bad was  the homicide ? Or the  car crash?

Speaking of which,  there are  no cars crashing midair on  Rohit Shetty’s new frighteningly unfair fare. It is  meant to  be  a comedy. But I didn’t  find a single moment of laughter  in the lengthy  one-note  joke  about two sets  of twins  and  mistaken identity. But then  I am not qualified  to  appreciate  hitmaker  Ro-hit’s  sense  of  humour.  I didn’t think  much of Golmaal either. But yes,  if slapstick means  slapping around the  characters then Cirkus  passes  the  lit-mast test.

Sanjay Mishra gets slapped  at least  4-5 times. Other  characters  also get the  thappad regularly.   It is  like the  slap rather than the slapstick is  the standing joke in a film that  chokes on its own jokes and  doesn’t seem  to care  about whether  the audiences finds the  gags  amusing  or not.

So there are two Ranveer Singhs  and two  Varun Sharmas, all four remarkably subdued in a film where even  poor Sulabha Arya is required to be  over-the-top. The actors seem  to have  field day running amok, trying to make sense of what they are told to do.At  some point in the freaked-out pandemonium Johnny Lever shows  up as a goon called Poslon Dada who thinks one shouldn’t touch other’s feet but one’s own, as self respect is  most  important.

Shetty and his team  should be  touching their own feet to reassure themselves that what they are  doing is  really respectable comedy.

Rohit Shetty claims  Cirkus(what can we expect from people who  don’t even  know  how to spell  properly?) is adapted  from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. It’s like saying Jai Santoshi Maa was  adapted from Joan Of Arc.