Chashme Baddoor
Year: 2013
Director: David Dhawan
Cast: Ali Zafar, Siddharth, Divyendu Sharma, Tapsi Pannu, Rishi Kapoor, Lillete Dubey

The rate at which the remakes are being made is simply phenomenal. Now David Dhawan jumps onto the remake-bandwagon and dishes out a 2013 version of the 1981- Chashme Baddoor. The original belongs to the ranks of all-time comedy classics. The Sai Paranjape-directed film, which featured a sterling cast of Deepti Naval, Farooque Sheikh, Ravi Baswani, Rakesh Bedi and Syed Jaffrey, was a fine blend of subtle humor and sweet romance. Knowing Dhawan’s forte of colorful but crass comedies, it is hard not to harbor serious reservations about the new deal. So how is it?

Plot

Three young friends – a shy, studious fellow (Ali Zafar); a cheapo poet (Divyendu Sharma) and a wannabe actor (Siddharth) are sharing a room. Their landlady (Lillete Dubey) and cafe owner (Rishi Kapoor) are at the end of their tether as these youngsters keep offering lame excuses to avoid paying up their dues. Meanwhile, the perpetually skirt-chasing poet-actor friend- duo spots a good-looking young girl (Tapsi Pannu) in the neighborhood. After failing to score with her, both conceal their failures with made-up tall tales of their ‘physical’ encounters! As it happens always, the good fellow wins the girl’s affection. The jealous friends now devise plans to nip this blooming romance in the bud. But since it is a comedy, finally everything falls into its place!

What’s hot?

·         Precious little, besides a few scenes where the veterans Rishi Kapoor and Lillete Dubey try to bring in some badly needed finesse to table!

What’s not?

·         Even if we forgo any comparisons to the original classic, still the film fails basic the litmus test of comedy – making audiences laugh!

·         If we decide to compare then it fares even worse because it never even comes near the original in terms of the quality of writing, direction, music and acting.

·         The crude, crass comedy formula (whenever it works!) works mainly through the star-power and raw madcap energy.  Here it fails big time because the three male lead actors and their heroine- all of them belong to the ‘newcomers still finding their feet’- category and the film hardly ever manages to shake off its lethargy.

·         Ali Zafar is dull; Tapsi Pannu is a passable Preity Zinta-reminder; Divyendu is seriously hampered by badly written dialogues and the rest (Siddharth, Anupam Kher and Bharti Achrekar) are gratingly over-the-top.

Verdict

Chashme Baddoor (2013) fails not because it is not as good as Chashme Baddoor (1981).

It fails because it isn’t good at all!