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Saturday, January 04, 2014

Mr Joe B. Carvalho  


Clumsy Does It! 

There is a strange industry superstition that films releasing in the first week of January don’t do well, so invariably no-hopers like Mr Joe B. Carvalho get to the theatres. They flop, making this a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Looks like director Samir Tiwari and his team fell off their chairs laughing at the clever title they had thought up, and forgot to write the rest of the script. They seem to have left it to the actors to cobble something as they went along, and the result is a turkey-sized dud.

Arshad Warsi playing the eponymous detective an idiot with a blind mother (Himani Shivpuri), who keeps falling off balconies.  He finally gets a case from a Khurana (Shakti Kapoor), to look for his daughter who has run off with the cook.

At the same hotel checks in a hitman so deadly, that just uttering his came kills—and Jaaved Jaaferi plays Carlos mostly in drag. He also sucks on a lollipop and has a conversation with his parents in their voices.  Jaaferi is an excellent comic and mimic, but he should be given something substantial to do. He just keeps getting into weird disguises and spouting matching accents. 


Joe is mistaken for the terrorist and has a cop Shantipriya (Soha Ali Khan), also his ex-girlfriend on his trail, plus a gangster MK (Vijay Raaz) and his sidekicks. The root of all the confusion is an African 'general' called Kopa Kabana. With the excuse of going undercover, Shantipriya gets to do a cabaret number and lounge by poolsides in bikinis.

The idea of humour is having people fly into the air or fall into ditches or die in strange ways when they utter Carlos’s name. And everybody, with the exception of Arshad Warsi acts in a ‘look at me I am acting so funny’ mode. Warsi gets the comic tone right, pointless though in a film that doesn’t have two laughs to rub together.

By the end of it, when all the characters gather at one spot for the climax, the audience is either crying with relief, or asleep with boredom. The year can only get better after this.











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