Kis Kisko Pyaar Karoon
Synopsis:
Picture this absolute chaos where Kapil Sharma is literally sprinting across a grand wedding mandap in the middle of the night wearing three different colored sherwanis at the exact same time because he has managed to marry three different women in the same building without any of them knowing he already has a wife.
So then, to understand why a guy is sweating through multiple traditional outfits in front of an angry mob of brides, we gotta go back to the start of this wild ride that totally fits into the classic tradition of chaotic bollywood comedies.
Kumar is just this super unlucky guy whose marriage keeps getting derailed by random tragedies, and right when he thinks his life is over, his matchmaking friend Karan, played by Varun Sharma, steps in and sets him up with a girl, but then Kumar accidentally gets married to three different women because he just cannot say no to anyone.
The three wives are Juhi, Anjali, and Simran, played respectively by Manjari Phadnis, Elli Avram, and Simran Kaur Mundi, and they all live in the exact same apartment building on different floors, which leads to the most exhausting athletic routine of running up and down stairs you have ever seen in any of the new hindi movies coming out these days.
Right in the middle of him trying to figure out which floor he belongs on, we suddenly get a full-blown song and dance number out of nowhere where backup dancers materialize in a living room and everyone's wearing neon jackets, which is honestly standard procedure for bollywood movies if you want to keep the audience awake.
Anyway, Kumar also has a secret fourth girlfriend named Deepali, played by Sai Lokur, and she is the one he actually loves, which makes the logistical nightmare of his daily schedule even more ridiculous because he is constantly making up fake business trips and emergencies to appease all four women.
We reach the interval block right when Kumar’s frantic juggling act is about to completely collapse because all the wives and the girlfriend end up booking the exact same luxury resort for a holiday, and the sheer panic on Kapil Sharma's face during this sequence is honestly the peak of modern hindi films comedy.
The funny thing is that Arbaaz Khan shows up as an underworld don named Bhai who is also dealing with complex romantic drama because his sister happens to be one of the women Kumar is tangled up with, and Bhai spends a solid ten minutes waving a golden handgun around and talking about loyalty while wearing a silk shirt that costs more than my car.
Let us just take a second to appreciate the background extra in the lobby scene who is holding a fake pineapple for five whole minutes without blinking once, just standing near a potted palm tree looking deeply concerned about the hotel's continental breakfast selection while the main characters are screaming at each other.
Right after that chaotic resort trip, the lies start falling apart faster than cheap cardboard, and Kumar gets cornered from every possible angle by his wives, his girlfriend, his matchmaking buddy, and the gun-toting brother who is ready to make him history.
The climax hits full throttle at a massive wedding venue where all four women finally figure out the entire scam and they line up with rolling pins and brooms while Kapil Sharma begs for mercy in front of Supriya Pathak who plays his weary mother in the film.
Kumar confesses to the whole mess in front of everyone and somehow manages to convince all of them through sheer fast-talking charm that his heart was in the right place even if his wedding certificates were completely fraudulent.
The women finally forgive him, everybody agrees to sort out the polygamous mess in the most bizarrely wholesome way possible, and Kumar smiles directly into the camera as the final song kicks in and the credits roll over a massive dance party on the stage.
There is a specific sound a door makes in a farce when it has to swing open and shut every four seconds to prevent two women from seeing each other, and it is the exact same sound that dominates the first twenty minutes of Kis Kisko Pyaar Karoon. The sound designer clearly gave up on acoustic variation around the third reel, opting instead for a hollow, echoing thwack that reverberates through every corner of a lavishly oversized apartment that somehow exists entirely to facilitate marital panic. It is a small thing but it bugged me.
Abbas-Mustan usually direct their actors like they are plotting a high-stakes bank robbery even when they are just walking across a living room, but here they seem content to let the framing dissolve into a muddy pastel wash that makes every single room look like an airport hotel lobby with delusions of grandeur. The screenplay by Dheeraj Rattan and Vicky Sahota borrows heavily from old regional plays and every French bedroom farce ever translated into bad English, yet it refuses to let a single joke land without hitting the audience over the head twice with a rubber mallet just in case someone in the back row missed the punchline. Three different women are married to the same perpetually exhausted man, which is a premise that requires a sort of manic, clockwork precision that the editing room simply could not muster on a tight schedule.
Kapil Sharma enters the frame with the exact same nervous grin he uses to welcome film stars onto his television show, carrying the entire weight of a convoluted plot on shoulders that look perpetually ready to shrug and ask for an early lunch. He is playing Kumar, a man whose accidental matrimonial generosity lands him in a four-way domestic trap that defies both logic and zoning laws. He handles the physical comedy with the desperate energy of a guy trying to talk his way out of a speeding ticket, sweating through his pastel shirts while rattling off dialogue that sounds like it was translated from a Gujarati stage script by way of WhatsApp. His comic timing remains undeniably sharp when he is standing alone and talking directly to the camera with his eyebrows working overtime, but the moment he has to react to any of his co-stars, the rhythm drops dead on the floor.
Varun Sharma fares slightly better as the obligatory best friend whose entire personality consists of looking bewildered and wearing shirts that hurt the retinas, playing essentially the same character he perfected in Fukrey without finding any new notes to hit. The women in the cast—Elli Avram, Manjari Phadnis, Simran Kaur Mundi, and Sai Lokur—are given very little to do besides switch from glamorous nightwear to even more glamorous daytime wear while screaming at varying decibels whenever a door clicks. Arbaaz Khan shows up in a few scenes looking like he wandered onto the wrong soundstage and decided to stay for the catering, delivering his lines with a sleepy detachment that suggests he read the script in the makeup chair and immediately regretted his life choices. Supriya Pathak anchors the emotional chaos with a performance that is leagues better than the material deserves, managing to look genuinely heartbroken and profoundly annoyed within the exact same reaction shot.
The cinematography by Johnny Lal relies so heavily on soft-focus lens filters that half the actors look like they have been smeared in petroleum jelly, creating a dreamy, hazy aesthetic that completely clashes with the frantic, door-slamming energy of the plot. Every musical number directed by Tanishk Bagchi and Javed-Mohsin feels dropped in from a different movie entirely, featuring backup dancers who are working three times as hard as the principal cast to sell choreography that looks like it was assembled in the parking lot ten minutes before the cameras rolled. The sound mixing is atrocious in the dialogue-heavy scenes, often cutting abruptly from studio-dubbed perfection to hollow room tone the second an actor turns their head away from the boom mic. Hindi films have a long and storied history of marital chaos comedies, but this one lacks the breezy charm of Pati Patni Aur Woh or the gleeful absurdity of David Dhawan's mid-nineties output, settling instead for a flat, television-sketch aesthetic that feels about five feet too wide for the big screen.
Beneath the endless parade of misunderstandings and mistaken identities, the movie wants to say something mildly subversive about the sheer exhaustion of trying to please everyone all the time, though it constantly loses its nerve whenever a joke threatens to become genuinely offensive. It plays like a sitcom pilot that got stretched out to feature length because nobody had the heart to tell the producers that the central joke peaked five minutes in. You can feel the sweat dripping off the crew members in the wide shots where the lighting rig dips into the top of the frame. There is an audience for this kind of broad, unchallenging entertainment that demands nothing from its viewers beyond a willingness to tolerate repetitive slapstick, and bollywood movies have certainly delivered worse over the years without causing permanent psychological damage.
When the credits finally roll, you are left with the distinct impression of having spent two hours trapped in an elevator with a distant relative who insists on explaining every single punchline to a joke you stopped listening to ten minutes ago, and no amount of glossy set design or enthusiastic grinning from the lead actor can quite wash away the lingering sense of fatigue.