Muavza: Zameen Ka Paisa

Story: A seasoned conman tricks five obnoxiously rich brothers into splurging all of their wealth with the promise that he will help them sell off their acres of land to builders at a sky-high rate.

Review: Five hare-brained brothers from a Gujjar family — Chowdhary Jaikishan (Akhilendra Mishra), Jasram (Pankaj Berry), Jaspal (Govind Pandey), Jagbir (Tejinder), Jaiveer (Deepak Verma) — are born with a silver spoon in their mouth. They fall prey to the carefully crafted, malicious plans of a machiavellian village pandit Bechu Bhai (Annu Kapoor), who, in turn, ensures that they taste the sand beneath their foot.

Upon realising that the acres of land Chowdhary brothers own in the small hamlet of Aari (bordering capital city Delhi) can fetch crores of rupees if sold to builders who are looking at massive expansion, Bechu takes over the remote control of their lives and plays with the strongest emotion common to all these vacuous brats — the zeal to be the greatest Chowdhary around.

The sexual innuendos (however vulgar and at times unnecessarily raunchy) and watching Annu Kapoor reiterate throughout that he is the baddie make us snigger. The thick Haryanvi-Gujjar accent, exhibition of splurging, the obnoxious behaviour and the overall setting are not as intolerable as the script itself. Across all verticals, stories tend to have a cause-effect factor and rightly so. Annu Kapoor’s unquenchable thirst to strip the brothers off their wealth stems out of no long-forgotten conflict or even a fractured friendship. Two more glaring flaws in the film are its title — tread with caution if you assumed that it is self-explanatory; there is a fleeting mention of 'zameen' only four to five times — and the incessant rambling that the scriptwriters seem to have indulged in.

One scene that is sure to resonate with you (for wrong reasons) is when a pivotal character demands drinks after official hours and shoots the bartender in the head for denying it — a direct reference to the primary plot of 'No One Killed Jessica'.

If anyone deserves a pat on the back for this insipid tale then it is the actors. If only the director, Girish Juneja, had focused more on weaving the plot into a tight-knit story and not gone haywire with it.