STATUTORY WARNING : Not for serious viewers, critics and any kind of creature of the Homo sapiens tribe with anything present inside the upper part of their skull.
This is how this Fun2shh, the weirdly-named laugh riot movie, should begin. For after the two-and-half hours of the movie, the aforementioned creatures (if they still exist in the theatre till then, that is) are bound to feel like suing the director and scriptwriter (both of which happen to be the debutante Imtiaz Punjabi). (Un)Fortunately for my MS friends, I’m not one of them.
It’s after a long time I finally decided to watch a Hindi movie at the theatre – and the unusual-looking theme of Fun2shh was a hands-on winner over the predictable KHNH, the current talk of the season (and anyway more than one of my friends have already got me brimming over with the story of KHNH).
And tell you guys, I clearly enjoyed this movie, and wonder why anyone wouldn’t. But as I already said – don’t go to watch Fun2shh looking for authenticity and logic, for there are none. There are a thousand and one faults in the movie, if you want to point out. For one, in the 10th century (where the dudes of the story land up) you get this king called Babur Shah (pronounced Baa-boo-r Shah) who has this 40 queens and yet only two daughters to inherit him (aw!), people going around in Roman costumes in his kingdom (except himself), and in spite of the name of the king sounding obviously Muslim, the court is only populated by saadhus ( didn’t know even Hindu kings were supposed to have their courts filled with saadhus anyway!).
I’m leaving the task of further negative criticism to my fellow MS friends, and some of them are definitely going to come back much irritated from the theatre after watching this one (I’m sure most of them have something filled inside their upper skull, don’t they?)
The story of the movie, as I already said, is unusual. It begins as a pair of good-for-nothing guys, Arjun and Vicky, get a job in an equally nonsensical security agency (where their friend Johnny was already employed) to protect a crown belonging to the 10th century king Babur Shah in an exhibition. The crown gets stolen by the infamous Chindoo Chor (for the uninitiated, chor is the Hindi of ‘thief’), and our three heroes are suspected of being associates of the thief. During a high speed car chase to escape being caught by the people of the security agency, they hit a wall and are sucked into it, and on to the kingdom of king Babur Shah, in the 10th century! That’s where the real story starts to roll from.
The movie stars a pair of newcomers, Iqbal Khan (Vicky) and Netanya Singh (one of the princesses) while the other lead pair are the one-film-old Anuj Sawhney (Arjun) and Raima Sen (the other princess). But the veteran actor Paresh Rawal (Johnny) steals the show. He is as funny as his witty one-liners and has the audience almost falling off their seats almost every time he delivers a dialogue. The other two guys look as much dumb as the dumbos they play, so that comes off quite well too. As for the girls, all they get to do is to pout and look pretty, so not much to say of the acting. Gulshan Grover has managed both the roles of Chindoo Chor (of the 21st century) and king Babur Shah (of the 10th century) wonderfully.
I’ve already confessed that the movie has more than one drawback. The sets look unreal, and in fact there’s part in the movie when the three guys first enter the city (in the 10th century) and are arguing if it’s a real city or a movie set – and that particular scene really falls flat because the city does look painfully like a movie set. But if you’re a debutante director working with a group of newcomers with no star-value, on a shoestring budget and on a set erected for something else (that’s quite a bit of trivia, isn’t it? – Fun2ssh was made on the sets actually erected for a costume serial called Amrapali.), it’s really unfair to expect any more from you.
In the end, Fun2shh is a complete entertainer. Go to watch it with your friends, have a few light moments, laugh, and then forget about it as you walk out of the theatre. If you stop to think over it afterwards, you know you’re wasting your time!