Happy Patel Khatarnak Jasoos review: Vir gati ko prapt…

Happy Patel: Khatarnaak Jasoos
Director: Vir Das, Kavi Shastri
Actors: Vir Das, Mithila Palkar
Rating: 1 star

This film starts off with Aamir Khan, playing one, Don Mario, a family man, with his tongue firmly hanging from his cheek, going all Goan, in 1991 — battling a couple of goras as he’s killed off in this opening sequence itself.

Aamir, bit of a behroopiya/shape-shifter himself on the big-screen, can be funny; nearly always, even in ads, as a result. He’s the reason I’ve showed up for Happy Patel. Not because he’s the lead actor.

But that he’s the producer, having pulled off in the past, a couple of pix traversing political comedy (Peepli Live, 2010), to complete mad-cap (Delhi Belly, 2011). Happy Potty/Patel decidedly belongs to the latter/toilet genre.

The tone, hence, is set with a car-chase involving Premier 118 NEs, and the don who gets shot at, but is still chilling with his kids, wife.

Only, the said prologue that’s supposed to draw you into this supposedly wacky world, feels like such unfiltered, abruptly unedited rushes of a film — they sufficiently prepare you, instead, for the similarly shoddily shot, disjointed, breathless randomness, without context/care to follow, over the next couple of hours.

If you don’t connect from the get go, you’re gone, no? Whether or not in Goa.

The lead actor is, of course, stand-up comedian, Vir Das, used to set-ups and punchlines, who’s co-written, co-directed this pic.

I’d blindly pay for his onstage comedy (as I do), even when he’s testing new material with audiences for guinea-pigs, where he’s better still, like cricketers on the net.

But a movie, let alone a farce, is another beast altogether. The prologue here switches to 2025, Goa, in a place called Panjor that rhymes with Tanjore; sounds like the Punjabi expletive for juvenile humour.

Vir plays a Brit boy, failed spy, with two white dudes for dads, sent into Goa, on an espionage mission that took me forever to figure, if I have at all, for the movie to make base-level sense.

Beyond that I was placing this in my head as Full Monty kinda British working-class humour, or an NRI movie, to begin with.

And that Happy Patel, I suppose, must rescue a Brit woman from the clutches of the Goan female villain (Mona Singh), dipping hash-browns into tea, locally developing fairness creams that permanently turn brown into whites.

No knock. Surely there’s sub-text. Multiple in-jokes too. Or maybe all of this sounds funny at a script-narration, or rehearsals in a room.

As Happy, quite sadly, goes along, meeting local dancer (Mithila Palkar), sardar BFF (Sharib Hashmi), three female cops making cameos, a white guy called Tom, whenever his name is unwittingly called out…

The dialogue humour is chiefly over Happy screwing up his Hindi. Scenes range from death by qawwali to a restaurant with one table. None of it lands. Because frankly, it never took off.

I can guess, if not see why this feels flat. Probably the lack of the rudimentary, handy craft of a wider story to follow — so the audience can gladly slip into the odd inconsistencies that appear, now and then, to remind them, this is a screwball comedy, after all.

In a filmy sorta way, that story’s gotta be so believable, right? It’s what happens within it that, hence, feels funny.

Take the genre’s best — Andaaz Apna Apna, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, down to the most recent, Madgaon Express, with characters you still invest your emotions in. And you’ll know what I mean.

Or, why I’ve been fidgeting in my theatre, wondering if this variety of pseudo parody passes for subversion anymore, when the broader middle-of-the-road as mainstream seems dead at the cinemas, anyway.

But, what if I wasn’t in the cinema? Maybe this could go well with midnight munchies and substances that excite such cravings? Who knows; maybe — and that people will discover it online, seeing it quite differently.

This is Vir’s directorial debut. He’s easily the most productive artiste I know, having delivered his memoir, shortly after a Netflix special. And this is perhaps his first theatrical release as the ‘in & as’ lead, if not since forever.

By the time the film descends to its master-chef climax, I groan if we must also martyr ourselves to this dream come true — go ‘Vir gati ko prapt’ — when creativity has been so collectively put to sleep. Ah, well.