After the two successful franchises of ‘Fukrey’ in 2013 and ‘Fukrey Returns’ in 2017, writer Vipul Vig and director Mrighdeep Singh Lamba must have thought that they could pull off another entertainer and laugh all the way to the bank. No harm in dreaming, but didn’t they know that they needed a script — a solid one at that — to allow fine actors to play around with?
‘Fukrey 3’ stars almost all of the cast of the earlier prequels and would have been a laugh riot too had there been some really eccentric characters in funny situations delivering side-splitting lines. All it does is make use of the talent of actors in stale circumstances. With little success.
The story of four friends facing disastrously funny situations together and having each other’s backs through the trenches, to make it out of a new mess each time, is a great premise to build on. Having earned the fast buck two times with the first two films, it isn’t difficult to cash in on a similar themed film.
And so, Lamba’s ‘Fukrey 3’ has no plausible storyline. All it has are the familiar characters — Choocha (Varun Sharma), Lali (Manjot Singh), Hunny (Pulkit Samrat), and Pandit (Pankaj Tripathi) — returning as a team to get even with Bholi Punjaban (Richa Chadha).
Bholi of course is as ambitious as ever, and is contesting the upcoming Delhi Legislative Assembly election. As luck would have it, Choocha too is an unlikely contender as an independent challenger to Bholi.
The script centers around the four and keeps threatening to get derailed with absurd twists. One of them involves Bholi’s bodyguard Bobby (Olanokiotan Gbolabo Lucas) and Dhingra (Amit Dhawan), the villain who has a thing for Bholi and has also helped her in many ways in return for which he wants sexual favors from her.
The first half is all over the place and has bizarre meaningless turns that don’t head anywhere. Once in South Africa, where they have a job in the mines to find a diamond, there is some plot development but it gets completely disrupted with the silliest of jokes that revolve around pee, petrol and water.
From among the cast, for Varun Sharma as Choocha, it’s half the battle won as he plays the central joker and has others concentrating on his weird plans. Chadha looks too listless in this part adventure, comedy, drama, thriller, and like the rest of the actors, doesn’t really add up. Tripathy has a lot of fun trying to make the nonsensical look believable for him. A great actor that he is, he walks away with taalis from the audience in many of the scenes. (IANS/Arnab Banerjee)
