Dhamaal 4 Movie Review: A pirate ship. A treasure hunt. Endless shouting, stomping and cartoonish chaos. A barrage of fat-shaming jokes. A few meta one-liners that don’t land. A bunch of skeletons. Three
octopuses. One tiger. One cobra. One crocodile. Two dolphins with Ajay Devgn riding atop them. And histrionics. That’s Dhamaal 4 in a nutshell.
The fourth instalment in Indra Kumar’s Dhamaal franchise is rattling, loud and ludicrous. It goes above and beyond slapstick and brainrot. But full marks to the makers for their effort! They try every trick in the dusty handbook of comic capers to make you laugh. But somehow, none of the constant bickering, exaggerated movements, comical accidents and confusion land.
Its idea of humour is painfully simple – slap a character, make them fall down, make them trip, hang them off a cliff and shove a knife into their buttocks. The film throws everything at the wall in the hope that something sticks. But very little does. Excess is the film’s guiding principle, which perhaps explains its relentlessly verbose storytelling. Everything is spelt out loud here.
Every gag is explained, every beat underlined and every punchline repeated until there’s nothing left for the audience to discover on their own, proving Dhamaal 4 has little faith in its audience. And when nothing else works, a wrestling match is orchestrated between a plus-sized woman and a vertically challenged man belonging to a tribal community.
In all honesty, Dhamaal 4 operates on a threadbare, one-line plot – a bunch of people on a hunt to unravel some Shaitan Singh’s century-old gold that lies hidden in a cave deep inside a jungle. This is then stretched to form an overlong film. It starts off with an animated montage of a Bambaiya tapori-speaking guru in a ‘guru-cool’ narrating this story of Shaitan Singh.
The montage also has a cameo by Jackie Shroff. Cut to, we’re introduced to a pirate named Adhura and his gang on a mission to steal gold. They get into a scuffle with Prithvi, the only person who has the map to the cave. Enters Guddu, who fights Adhura as he feels only he has the right to own the treasure. In his spare time, Guddu tries to impress his girlfriend’s kids and win their approval.
We’re then introduced to Lallan, who prays for a rich girl with an ‘extra large car’ and ‘extra large bungalow’. God hears him and brings into his life an ‘extra large’ woman named Paro. No, these aren’t our words. And then there’s Adi and Manav. Adi is trying his best to win Rosie back, who had left him a year ago on their wedding night after Manav accidentally had set her on fire.
The common link between all of them? Greed. Greed drives them to meet atop a cliff where Prithvi and Guddu are seen hanging and fighting for their lives. Thereafter, they set out to discover the cave that holds the key to their fortunes and a brighter future behind an ‘M’ shaped rock. On the way, they brave storms and man-eater animals.
If Phool Aur Kaante introduced Ajay balancing on two motorcycles, this film raises the stakes or lowers them depending on your perspective by having him ride on two dolphins in the middle of the choppy ‘Barbarian Sea’. And then, taking a cue from Himmatwala, he fights a tiger as if it’s just another one of his hobbies. This is met with the dialogue, ‘Singham pe Singham chadh gaya.’
But why should Guddu have all the fun? So, in the next sequence, we see Adi, Manav and Rosie fighting a crocodile that has trapped them by clamping Rosie’s water bottle in its jaws. How Manav manages to fool the maneater using a penknife is worth a watch! At 2 hours 23 minutes, Dhamaal 4 is an excrutiatingly exhausting watch that never moves the story beyond square one.
The first half is marked with long, elaborate sequences of ghosts and of people falling, drowning and hanging from the most impossible of places. And then comes the second half. The entire sequence of the gang discovering wealth inside the cave is so gruelling and so endless that it starts to test your patience. And then comes the problematic ‘gags’.
The makers leave no beat to mock Paro for her weight for cheap laughs. She’s constantly made to fall on Lallan with him losing his breath and letting out a prayer to stay alive. Every movement is exaggerated to cartoonish proportions. When she jumps, the ground appears to tremble. When she exhales, it’s treated like a gust powerful enough to trigger a storm.
And then enters a character with dwarfism. His appearance is met with Lallan uttering, ‘Yeh chikoo kam, angoor zyada lag raha hai.’ A tribal community is also brought in to evoke laughter. The constant theatrics and over-the-top dialogue delivery by Riteish Deshmukh’s Lallan, who speaks Bihari and ends every sentence with ‘bey’ doesn’t really help.
How is any of this funny, you’ll end up asking yourself every now and then. And there are constant references made to Dhamaal. If anything, they make you sadder. Only if changing the ‘W’ to ‘M’ could’ve been that one formula to crack a sequel. This is an absolute disservice. By the end of it, Dhamaal 4 becomes yet another instalment that perhaps was only made to milk the franchise value.
The actors, unfortunately, are unable to help elevate the middling screenplay generously peppered with glaring brand placements. Arshad Warsi and Jaaved Jaaferi manage to stand out and truth be told, this duo deserves a spin-off of their own. Ajay and Sanjay Mishra share an easy, lived-in camaraderie that occasionally lands but the film pushes them into such exaggerated histrionics that their performances become less amusing.
Meanwhile, Riteish is saddled with an overcooked Bihari accent that proves more distracting than endearing. Ace actors like Ravi Kishan and Upendra Limaye get the shorter end of the stick and are left stranded on the periphery with little to do beyond making intermittent appearances. But it’s the women, who suffer the most, thanks to their thin characters.
Esha Gupta in a cameo and Sanjeeda Sheikh as Rosie are neither given agency nor purpose. They appear to have been included merely to pad out the ensemble. Anjali Anand as Paro fares the worst of the lot. She bears the brunt of the film’s weakest instincts. Reduced entirely to the butt of fat-shaming jokes, she’s given little to do beyond enduring a stream of outdated punchlines.
Watching her being subjected to such writing is disappointing and disheartening. The tragedy of Dhamaal 4 isn’t that it’s silly. Dhamaal was always meant to be silly. It’s that the film confuses this silliness with a stale cacophony of falling bodies and animal attacks. Much like its characters on a treaure hunt, Dhamaal 4 also searches for something equally elusive – humour that’s not tone-deaf.
