Total Dhamaal

Total Dhamaal Story: Total Dhamaal is the third instalment in the Dhamaal franchise. A hidden booty of 50 crore leads to a mad chase amongst a bunch of greedy and eccentric characters. In them, are a bickering couple on the verge of a divorce, greedy siblings, local goons, a police commissioner and the mastermind of the loot. Will they finally discover the hidden treasure?

Total Dhamaal Review: Trains ramming into cars, falling bridges, roaring wild cats and crash landing helicopters. Director Indra Kumar’s Total Dhamaal leaves very little to imagination in creating a loud comedy. However, the ensemble star cast aside, this pursuit for comic adventure turns into a misadventure pretty early on in its ride.

To begin with, the film’s plot is weaker than the rickety bridge we have seen in the promo. But it hinges on many strong shoulders, who deliver despite obvious flaws in the writing. The film opens on quite a paisa vasool note with the grand title song introducing each one of them. They are immediately bunged in together in an unconvincing plot twist. While everyone is in pairs of two, it’s the magical pairing of Anil and Madhuri that brings out the most LOL moments. The duo still share a crackling chemistry and an impeccable partnership for comedy. Anil is hilarious as the distressed pati with his amusing Gujarati accent and Madhuri uses her natural flair for Marathi to hit all the right comic notes. While Ajay Devgn performs well within the limitations of his poorly written character, it’s the otherwise excellent Sanjay Mishra, who comes off as grossly annoying. He constantly keeps referring to Radhe (Ajay) as bro, trying hard to force humour into the situation. We have seen better camaraderie between Arshad Warsi and Javed Jaffrey in the previous instalments of the film. The two are largely stuck with slapstick scenes that don’t do enough justice to their collective talent. Meanwhile, Riteish Deshmukh makes good with his character of a pan-chewing ruffian Lallan, who puts his mouth where the money is, literally. His scenes with Johnny Lever are hilarious. Rest of the cast like Boman Irani, Mahesh Manjrekar and Esha Gupta are wasted in halfheartedly written characters.

Not only film’s screenplay, but even most of the punches are predictable. For an adventure comedy, Total Dhamaal also falters in many scenes with shoddy computer graphics. While the first half is breezy, second half is overburdened with too many characters in a weak plot. Director Indra Kumar misses out on the opportunity to generate steady stream of humour.

Given the ensemble cast, this film had the potential to be a comic roller coaster ride. However, the fact that the film is slapstick is not a problem, what brings it down is poor writing and execution.