Director: Hriday Shetty
Cast: Naseeruddin Shah, Kay Kay Menon, Ravi Kishan, Atul Kulkarni
It would really take some effort to mess up a film starring four supremely talented actors in lead roles. An uninspiring script and a dreary director work overtime to achieve such lackluster results. At the outset, Chaalis Chauraasi looks promising with its atypical cast and chronicle. But the one-dimensional plot fails to tap the immense potential of both.
Four policemen are on night patrol duty in their van but soon it turns out that the cops are actually crooks. Bobby (Atul Kulkarni) is a pimp, Pinto (Kay Kay Menon) a car thief and Shakti (Ravi Kishan) a drug peddler. Sir (Naseeruddin Shah) gets them together for a big loot worth Rs 20 crores. For their covert mission, they rob a police van and pose as cops. Until they encounter a real encounter-specialist (Rajesh Sharma) en-route.
The basic premise sounds interesting enough but the actual culprit of this crime-comedy is Yash-Vinay’s humdrum writing that fails to excite after the initial reels. Each character is individually introduced through episodes that excite only intermittently and the film takes too long to come to point. Once it does, it again strays into some haywire underworld encounter and when it finally arrives at the climax, it keeps beating around the bush – quite literally!
The primary plotline eventuates over the span of one night but director Hriday Shetty fails to keep the proceedings eventful, with the single-track storytelling getting repetitive after a while. One expects more momentous moments like, say, the similar one-night setting film Ek Chaalis Ki Last Local but Chaalis Chauraasi doesn’t even come close. Moreover the narrative cuts into frequent flashbacks so the one-night setting doesn’t quite register.
The male-dominated drama could have easily done without a female character and forcing Shweta Bhardwaj in the plot was absolutely avoidable. Also having three tiresome item songs in quick succession is surely not a sane idea for a thriller flick. And when the director is at loss of anything original or intelligent in the end, he opts for a painfully slapstick climax.
The dialogues are trite, editing is lousy and music is enervating. How one wishes Hriday Shetty would have put his impressive cast to better use over making them sing and dance needlessly and hopelessly at the drop of a hat. Neither does he have a great story at hands nor the prowess to extract effective acts from his cast. So everyone from Naseeruddin Shah, Kay Kay Menon, Ravi Kishan and Atul Kulkarni remain underutilized and fail to rise above the middling script.
Chaalis Chauraasi can be used as a case-study example on how good actors can go awry in the hands of mediocre writers and directors. Be alert next time!
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