‘Bhooth Bangla’
Dir: Priyadarshan
Actors: Akshay Kumar, Tabu, Wamiqa Gabbi, Paresh Rawal, Asrani, Rajpal Yadav
Rating: 3/5

Did we need three hours to tell this story? That was my first thought after watching the sparsely funny, slightly lazy Bhooth Bangla. Going into it, we knew that director Priyadarshan has the knack to extract the best out of Akshay Kumar. But that’s the best bit of this film. He has aced the humour. It’s silly in parts, but effectively extracts chuckles. However, the fatal flaw of this film is that it suffers from a Bhool Bhulaiyaa (2007) hangover.

Given that the superstar-director jodi brought to Bollywood its recent favourite fad — horror-comedy — way back in 2007 with the Vidya Balan-starrer, the expectation of recreating the same has become their biggest burden. You see similar tropes — a beautiful, forbidden bangla, local lore, Ashtami, choreographed dance pieces, a million bats, a rat running through the piano’s keys, and Rajpal Yadav parroting lines from the original. There is far too much in here that reminds you of Bhool Bhulaiyaa, mixed with a strange subplot about ritual killing.

Bhooth Bangla swells in its first half, but eventually falls short despite a brilliant mid-point. The tone shift post-interval takes the film downhill. It almost feels like another filmmaker directed it. Jokes vanish completely in the second hour, and this is where the writing by Rohan Shankar, Abhilash Nair, and Priyadarshan starts to give way. I wonder if they ever took a beat and asked — “Did we forget to connect these dots?”

The film is funny, just not consistently. You get the occasional line that lands, a visual gag that clicks, a bit of physical comedy that reminds you why the combination of Priyadarshan and Kumar works so well in the first place. But these moments are scattered. The ensemble adds to this confusion. Because how do you critique a cast that is, individually, so watchable? Paresh Rawal leaves us in splits. Yadav matches his comic timing in every frame. The late Asrani is nothing short of brilliant onscreen. But the female characters, except Tabu, be it Mithila Palkar or the ever-so-watchable Wamiqa Gabbi, are left untended. Jisshu Sengupta, who is somehow cast as the father to a man (Kumar) a decade older than him, seems like one of those decisions that the film never acknowledges, but hopes that the audience just goes along with it. You try. You do. But every time they share a scene, you are slightly annoyed at how the makers are still getting the basics so wrong.

To his credit, Kumar seems to be having a good time, which shows. His willingness to be silly without being desperate works in the film’s favour. In a tighter script, this performance could have had the chance to shine. The real issue is how uninventive and uninteresting the horror parts feel. It doesn’t scare and doesn’t parody superstitions enough. The horror bits feel like they are politely waiting for the comedy to finish before the jump scares.
Which brings you back to the central problem with Bhooth Bangla. It keeps trying to redo the magic of Bhool Bhulaiyaa, but mostly to its own disadvantage. Not because it’s terrible, but because it feels familiar and never quite good enough on its own. It’s been 19 years since that film. It was unlike anything we had seen before, then, with smarts and laughs in equal measure. Bhooth Bangla tries to ape the brilliance of the bygones instead of trying to be its own movie.

That’s the most Priyadarshan thing about this film — there’s chaos, comedy, and a bangla full of people running in and out of doors. But not all the doors lead somewhere interesting.