The only thing to admire about Pagalpanti
is that the makers were honest.
They set expectations with the film’s tagline
‘dimaag mat lagana’
and then made no attempt 
to exceed them.
Pagalpanti is a sloppy TikTok video stretched
to a torturous two hours and 29 minutes.
Whatever dimaag you might 
mistakenly bring to the film
will definitely be depleted 
by the end of it.
Director Anees Bazmee 
is a veteran of mindless comedies
though he isn’t a fan of that descriptor.
In interviews, he insists that 
in fact it takes a lot of mind
to do these mindless comedies.
Comedies like Pagalpanti, he says, 
don’t get made out of thin air.
Which begs the question – how exactly 
do these films get made?
What does the story narration consist of?
How do Bazmee and his co-writers 
Praful Parekh and Rajiv Kaul decide that
now it’s time for an item number 
in a haunted house
or that in this scene, 
obviously fake digital lions will appear
or that the villain will be 
a Nirav Modi look-alike named Niraj Modi,
which will then allow the cartoonish story 
to pretend that it also has a patriotic slant.
Or maybe part of John Abraham’s 
contract is that in every film,
his character needs to give 
at least one speech about humara desh.
There is a lengthy sequence in which characters
get stuck to a truck with super-glue;
a dance number in which all of them are dressed in
Arabic attire and surrounded by belly dancers
and a chase sequence in which cars are causing
mayhem in London, where the film is set.
There's little to connect all of this.
It’s like the writers wrote independent scenes 
and then just decided to string them together
desperately hoping, not that 
they will make sense,
but that somehow, 
they will make us laugh.
But here’s the tragedy – 
Pagalpanti is singularly unfunny.
Stray jokes land but by the second hour, 
the film is an arid, flat wasteland
that you have to endure 
to get to the end credits.
By this time, I actually started to feel bad
for John and Anil Kapoor
who sportingly sacrifice their dignity 
to make us smile.
At one point, John playing 
the always unlucky Raj Kishore,
is wearing a clown suit.
And Anil, as the lily-livered mafia don Wifi,
is lying on the floor and shaking his body 
while singing, "I am a Disco Dancer."
The women don’t even get the opportunity
to embarrass themselves.
Ileana D’Cruz’s brief must have been:
Look pretty and helpless.
Kriti Kharbanda is a plastic dumb heiress.
And Urvashi Rautela, in tight leather pants
and zero expressions, provides some relief
as unintentional comedy.
Saurabh Shukla playing the gangster Raja Sahab
gets to wear some nice bathrobes
and carry a bejeweled cane.
I hope he had fun.
Pagalpanti is so soul-sucking 
and brain-dead
that it makes Bazmee’s last film Mubarakan 
look like high art.
John said in an interview that 
they made this film to spread happiness
but I came out depressed.
In a few weeks, 
we'll be entering a new decade.
Hindi cinema needs to be better than this.
