Kanjoos Makhichoos Review: Not Funny At All!

Kunal Kemmu's default mode performing comedy is overacting.
When surrounded by much more competent theatre-trained actors, he falls consistently short.
(In the past, this role would have been tailor-made for Govinda), observes Deepa Gahlot.

There is always something satisfying about a common citizen taking on the might of the establishment.

Vipul Mehta's Kanjoos Makhichoos tries to tell such a story in a humorous format but it is too insubstantial to work either as a comedy or a social commentary.

Jamuna Prasad (Kunal Kemmu), dutiful son to Ganga Prasad (Piyush Mishra) and Saraswati (Alka Amin), is notorious in the Lucknow mohalla where they live for being a terrible miser.

As his exasperated wife, Madhuri (Shweta Tripathi Sharma) and son (Aish Nathani) look on, he squeezes the life of a toothpaste tube, extinguishes agarbattiS when the prayers are done to make them last, and bathes the kid at the river to save on water bills.

Turns out his excessive parsimony is to save money to fulfill his father's wish to go on a Char Dham yatra pilgrimage.

When they go on their trip, a storm hits Kedarnath with floods and landslides and the parents go missing.

After a certain period has passed, Jamuna is forced by a slimy bureaucrat Chaturvedi (Rajiv Gupta) and his sidekick (the late Raju Shrivastav) to accept compensation from the government, minus their cut.

Once he accepts the money and spends on things he had deprived his family of, there's a twist and Jamuna is faced with the full extent of the corruption and apathy of the petty officials. Once he decides to unravel his own problems, others arise.

He wants to be honest, but there are hurdles placed in his path by Chaturvedi.

But the bureaucrat had not bargained for the cleverness of the daft-looking Jamuna and his mohalla mates, including an aunt (Hema Singh), who is a social media addict.

Based on a Gujarati play, Sajan Re Jhooth Mat Bolo, which would explain the staginess of some of the exchanges between characters, the plot does have some merit. But the film with his slow pace, wailing background songs and an unsatisfactory performance by the lead actor peels off whatever interest might have been generated by Jamuna's plight.

Kunal Kemmu's default mode performing comedy is overacting.

When surrounded by much more competent theatre-trained actors, he falls consistently short. (In the past, this role would have been tailor-made for Govinda).

There may have been a few funny moments at the beginning of the film but who can laugh at the incongruity of a senior citizen flirting with a group of white women, and acquiring a vocabulary of English cuss words?

Mehta's writing and direction is old-style, whether it is the out-of-place dance number or the all-purpose UP dialect, which is not how Lucknow residents would speak.

The film, made with UP government subsidies, seems to have been made to fill some OTT quota.

These days one can't even say, watch it if there's nothing else, because there always is a better choice on another platform.

Kanjoos Makhichoos streams on ZEE5.