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.