Director Indra Kumar's caper about a deaf-blind duo is further affirmation of the fact that this summer vacation is comedy time in Bollywood.
Pyare (Fardeen) is blind, while Mohan (Vivek Oberoi) cannot hear, and these pleasant, likeable young men, well settled as partners in a gift shop they own, have only one mission in life. It's also their sole prayer to God and the raison d etre of the film: to find the women of their dreams, the women who will love them with all their hearts. But of course, there's a thrills angle too, and the two lines eventually, predictably, meet before long.
First, you've got to stomach the premise, which shouldn't be very difficult to do, considering we've all been weaned on masala commercial movies! Consider: Both, Pyare and Mohan, are excellent dancers, singers and fighters, even though Mohan, as we know, is deaf, and Pyare is blind. Pyare keeps in sync with the dance steps of a group with out being able to see them, and Mohan keeps faultlessly in step with the beat without being able to hear it. They were film stuntsmen who had a terrible accident and ended up losing sight and hearing respectively, and are today comfortably ensconced in a completely customer-less Archies Gallery of their own, set up with their own savings and bank loans. Must have set them back by a cool 50-60 lakhs at least, going by today's rates. How they managed that, without friends and family anywhere in sight, is a mystery. They also have a house, bought, again, by way of loans. By the way, Pyare packs a mean punch, but needs Mohan's verbal directions to land them squarely. And this comic masala film doesn't even pretend to depict the deaf and blind realistically.
In fact, this comic caper begins with a chilling sequence in a church confession box, where an obviously off-centre don Tony Fernandes (Boman Irani) has come to confess that he plans to kill someone the same day. And then we cut to a bodily lifted sequence from The Untouchables, in which the Tony, baseball bat in hand, maniacally bludgeons one of his partners in crime to a bloody death. Tony is pure, mad evil, and even in the brief opening sequence, Boman gives him the dangerous edge of a psychopath. But alas, as Tony bids the rest goodbye and enters his car, it explodes in a ball of fire, and Tony is killed.
And then the fun begins as the film shifts tracks to the comic. It begins crisply, introducing the duo with deft and hilarious strokes, defining Pyare as a visually impaired young man with a large heart and who can tell between a good and a bad-intentioned person. He buys a newspaper he obviously cannot see, and in a hilarious sequence even helps a poor blind man calling out in distress for help to cross the road.
In another hilarious sequence, Mohan is introduced dancing like a dervish at a wedding procession. His eyes are shut and he's enjoying himself. But before he can tell, he's veered from the wedding procession to the wake of a funeral, still dancing away. It happens to be the late don Tony's funeral, and Mohan bumps into Tiny, who is Tony's empty-headed younger brother, and who actually ends up getting arrested due to Mohan.
While these sequences are important to define Pyare and Mohan, they're also crucial to the part where the comic love story meets the thrills angle, but for now, we move on to Pyare's and Mohan's first meeting with the girls of their dreams, Preeti (Esha) and Pia (Amrita Arora) respectively. This is another hilarious sequence, especially the one in which Mohan (Vivek) first sees Pia (Amrita) jogging, and follows her with wide eyed rapture and ultimately strikes up a conversation that's full of funny misunderstandings. The blind Pyare, on the other hand, is jogging along,
Comments