Bhooth Bangla – Review

quick review:

In which Akshay Kumar competes with himself to yell his lines louder than he did in the previous scene. Yes, that’s the only takeaway.

Review

“Do I really want to spend more time writing about this one? Isn’t it enough that I’ve already spent 4+ hours and hundreds of rupees on the trip to the theatre?” These are questions I find asking myself often. And it’s hardly a surprise that they came to me for Bhooth Bangla. But I have managed to resist giving into the “No.” so far. And I will try again today. Meanwhile, you can skip spending time on reading this one because “Yes, it’s that insufferable.”

Akshay Kumar is excruciatingly over-the-top—in volume, in expression, in body language. So much so that the other overbearingly shrill actors are drowned in his presence. And it’s not as if anything meaningful or entertaining is being said or seen.

Slapstick is of course staple nutrition for any Priyadarshan film that claims to be a comedy. You name it and you will see it—people tripping and falling, people slapping each other such that the slapped goes around in circles, toilet humour, innuendoes—all under the guise of being a laugh riot. I fail to understand, though. Why does characters scoffing and disapproving objectification of women need you to objectify women? With the objective of making you chuckle and giggle, that too!

But then, that would require the writing team to be imaginative. And the creativity began and ended with naming a film centred around a haunted palace, “Bhooth Bangla“. And just in case you were wondering, no, the larger story is no more than people disbelieving the haunted-ness of the house and coming around to drop that notion. What with all the jump scares, you see.

The nested story of why spirits have taken to this specific house is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo that needn’t have been so. There was so much meat in that story and such lovely complexity. But half of it is just narrated by one character to the other instead of being shown. And the half that is shown feels like a comic strip with caricatures.

With that then, I am left with little interest to ask questions like, “Why did the “reverse” option exist?” It is one thing to accept the fantasticness of a fantasy world. But quite another to give into the axiom that intelligent black magicians don’t follow simple logic.

Speaking of logic, I am grappling with the truth that the Priyadarshan-Akshay-Kumar-“comedy” genre exists and continues to do so. Hmmm…

– meeta, a part of the audience

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