Subhash K Jha speaks about Dhoom Dadakka 
By Subhash K. Jha, May 24, 2008 - 10:56 IST
By the time Sammir Dattani and Shaad Randhawa get into drag, this criminally unfunny comedy has dragged on way past 'bad'-time.
Maybe it's in the air. Everyone uniformly hams through this acutely painful piece of cinematic travesty. There's so much screaming and ranting across the length and breadth of this outrageous ode to idiocy that you wonder if the producer-director intended to provide earplugs for all those bravehearts who would sit to the end of this slapdash hectic and haphazard comedy of terrors.
No earplugs, what we get are shrill banshee ring-tones of risqué ragas sung at an ear-splitting pitch, and phallic jokes about not a single danda in the cell phone.
Chee chee.
If lately you've been wondering where the Bollywood comedy has been heading here's the answer. Comedies can't get any baser or brainless than Dhoom Dadakka. The gags make you gag. The items and innuendoes are embarrassing not because they TRY so hard to be vulgar but because they fail miserably to be sexy.
Vulgarity in this comedy of disembodied context depends completely on how many of the characters are crammed in one line of vision in every scene. They all stand making faces and gesticulating as though trying to attract the lifeguard's attention from a sinking boat.
The double meanings flow in unstoppered abundance mostly from the moist painted trembling lips of Deepshikha who keeps referring to the size of 'bada' things every time she spots a male member of the cast in her vicinity.
Yup, as one character winks, size does matter. Dhoom Dadakka is a jumbo-sized non-event.
Ha ha ho ho. Before you fall of your creaky bed in comic splendour, let's move on to the main 'coarse' in this pickled over-spiced thaali in a hotel that's probably named Romp Teri Giggle Maili.
The two guys, Sammir Dattani and Shaad Randhawa grimace and giggle, roll their eyes and suck in their cheeks to indicate lies buried too deep for jeers. Add two girls (Chhabria and Sikandar) trying so hard to be glamorous, it's pathetic, and you get a brew that's more eek than greek.
The characterizations take the cult of one-upmanship down to the level of a nukkad nautanki, what with every actor getting lost in the confusion of their mistaken identities.
In no time at all, the plot suffers from an identity crisis. Director Shashi Ranjan who earlier made us laugh with his supposedly serious study of marital stress in Dobara, doesn't know whether to indulge tongue-in-cheek comedy of the Hrishikesh Mukherjee variety(Ab ke sajan sawan mein aal lagey aisi filmon mein) or just do the out-and-out no-fools-stops comedy of the David Dhawan-Anees Bazmee variety.
Eventually the confusions that dominate the plot overpower every sense of aesthetic decency. In the end-game where the entire cast runs around an amusement part looking for amusement, the two heroes get into drag to tease laughter out of an audience that's long since ceased to be entertained or amused and is down to feeling utterly embrassed on behalf of the cast and crew of this weird brew.
In one chase sequence Shaad Randhawa pees copiously on a street of Bangkok.
You get jailed for dirtying the streets of Bangkok. Alas , there are no laws for desecrating the rules of aesthetics in cinema.
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