Humshakals
Synopsis:
So there is Saif Ali Khan running around a psychiatric asylum in London wearing a neon orange prison jumpsuit while shouting about electric shocks, and honestly, if you haven't seen Humshakals yet, you are missing out on peak mindless entertainment that only Bollywood can produce. Right after that totally chaotic bit with the electrocution gags, we actually gotta go back to the start to understand why anyone is in this mess. Ashok, played by Saif, is a billionaire who is super rich and has a loyal best friend named Kumar, played by Riteish Deshmukh, who is also rich and shares literally every single asset and lifestyle choice with him, down to coughing when Ashok coughs and getting sick when Ashok gets sick, which is weird even for hindi films. They both live in this massive mansion managed by their wicked uncle Kunal Kapoor, played by Ram Kapoor, who is secretly trying to poison them and drive them completely insane so he can steal their entire property empire. The funny thing is, Uncle Kunal employs a mad scientist type named Dr. Khan to invent a special memory-loss chemical mixture, and this concoction is disguised as a medicine that he forces our poor heroes to drink, and it immediately wipes their brains clean. So then, Ashok and Kumar wake up inside a high-security mental asylum in London, totally confused, and they have no idea who they are or how they got there, and to make matters worse, there are duplicate versions of them running around the hospital because Dr. Khan has created triples of everyone as part of a really convoluted plan that defies all logic and medical science. You have got three Ashoks, three Kumars, and three Uncle Kunals roaming the same city, bumping into each other in hotel lobbies and getting slapped by women who think they are cheating, which brings us to the heroines played by Tamannaah, Esha Gupta, and Bipasha Basu, who are all caught up in this romantic confusion because none of them can tell which guy is the real billionaire and which ones are the asylum escapees. Tamannaah plays Shanaya, who falls for one of the Ashoks, while Esha Gupta and Bipasha Basu are running around trying to figure out why their men are suddenly acting like total maniacs, wearing dresses, and barking like dogs in public places. The outfits in this movie deserve a whole blog post by themselves, especially this one sparkly green shirt that Riteish wears during a restaurant scene where a waiter keeps dropping plates on his head, and I swear I stared at that shirt for five whole minutes trying to figure out what polyester nightmare it was made of. Anyway, the plot barrels forward at lightning speed once the doctors at the asylum realize they have multiple copies of the same patients, leading to endless doors slamming, people hiding under beds, and slapstick comedy that feels like a cartoon come to life. Then the interval block hits right when the confusion is at its absolute peak, leaving everyone screaming in a hotel hallway while a totally random item song plays out of nowhere to kill the pacing completely, which is a classic move in these kinds of commercial hindi movies where nobody cares about continuity as long as the beats are catchy. Right after the intermission, the second half just goes off the rails with double roles multiplying into triple roles, and characters constantly slapping each other by mistake because they think they are dealing with the evil uncle instead of the nice billionaire. The psychological hospital scenes keep happening, and there is this one specific guard with a mustache who yells at Saif every time he tries to escape, and I love that mustache so much because it looks like a dead squirrel just glued to the guy's lip. The main characters keep switching identities, putting on fake mustaches, and pretending to be each other in front of the heroines, leading to conversations where nobody is actually talking to the right person, and yet somehow the romance somehow survives all this brain damage. The music video for Piya Ke Bazaar Mein pops up right in the middle of a serious rescue mission, forcing all three sets of lookalikes to dance synchronously in a fancy ballroom with hundreds of backup dancers, and honestly, who writes these scripts because I want whatever they were smoking when they decided that mental patients needed a full Bollywood dance routine. The comedy relies heavily on people getting hit in the face with flying cakes, stepping on rakes, and making weird facial expressions, and honestly, Saif Ali Khan commits to the bit so hard you almost forget he was in serious dramas before this. Then the climax happens at a massive corporate yacht party where all three Uncles, all three Ashoks, and all three Kumars show up at the exact same time, causing total pandemonium among the wealthy guests who have no clue why there is a literal army of identical men brawling over a microphone. The wicked Uncle Kunal tries to make his final escape by jumping onto a jet ski, but the good versions team up with the police and the heroines to trap him between two massive cruise ships while a ridiculously loud action theme song blasts through the speakers. The real Uncle gets knocked unconscious by a stray golf ball hit by one of the duplicate Kumars who wandered into a VIP golf simulator on the upper deck, and the police finally slap handcuffs on all the wrong guys before sorting it out in a pile of tumbling bodies. The film ends with everyone laughing hysterically on the deck of the boat while a cheesy remix of the title track plays over the credits and the camera slowly pans up into the London sky.
There is a specific kind of headache that only arrives when you watch someone deliver the exact same punchline three times in twenty minutes, and if I'm honest, Humshakals gave me that headache before the opening credits had even finished properly rolling. Look, nobody walks into a Sajid Khan picture expecting a Tarkovsky masterwork or even a tightly wound caper film, but there is a baseline level of human logic that movies usually respect, even broad farce, even Bollywood movies where the laws of physics are routinely treated as polite suggestions. Saif Ali Khan, playing one of his six distinct variations here—actually, wait, let me be precise, it's three characters multiplied by two because of twins or mental wards or genetic flukes, my notes got messy around hour two—looks less like an actor working and more like a man standing on a sinking raft who has just realized the rescue boat is made of cardboard.
The direction is frantic in that particular way where the editor seems to have ingested several espressos and lost the scissors, cutting away from reaction shots half a beat too soon or lingering on a background extra who is very clearly wondering what time craft services wraps for the day. Screenplays of this magnitude are rarely written so much as assembled from a bin of discarded sketches involving dogs driving cars, mistaken identities in posh London drawing rooms, and men in women's clothing falling over swimming pool diving boards. It's not that the humor is offensive, exactly, though it certainly tests your patience with its endless parade of mental asylum tropes that went out of style during the British Raj. It is simply exhausting, a relentless assault of people shouting at each other in identical hotel corridors while doors slam with the predictable regularity of a metronome set to agony.
Riteish Deshmukh usually manages to salvage these kinds of chaotic multi-character exercises with his background in Marathi theatre and genuine comic timing, but here he is marooned in a plot involving psychiatric wards and identity confusion that makes the plotting of Golmaal look like a piece of high-minded European minimalism. He has this one recurring bit where he barks like a dog whenever someone mentions royalty, and the first time it happens, you groan, but by the seventh time, you begin to wonder if the sound designer simply pasted the same audio file into ProTools and went for a cigarette. Ram Kapoor commits to the bit with an unsettling level of energy, playing a wealthy tycoon who also happens to be insane, and his sheer volume starts to feel like a personal threat after the hundredth costume change. The supporting women—Esha Gupta, Tamannaah, Bipasha Basu—spend ninety percent of their screen time standing in gorgeous outfits, reacting with mild bewilderment to the various men throwing themselves over tables, which is probably the most honest performance choice available to anyone in this cast.
Cinematography-wise, everything looks like it was shot through a jar of vaseline smeared with high-end designer perfume, bathed in artificial blues and yellows that blind the retina without ever creating a sense of place. London becomes a generic blur of double-decker buses and red telephone boxes used exclusively as props for people to fall out of while wearing inflatable fat suits. The soundtrack hits you over the head with generic dance tracks that sound like they were generated by an algorithm fed exclusively on mid-2000s remix albums, playing at maximum volume during scenes where three different guys wearing identical wigs are running around a golf course chasing a pig. It's a small thing, but the ADR work on Ram Kapoor's secondary character is so out of sync in the third reel that his lips keep moving for two full seconds after the dialogue track has completely stopped, and once you spot it, you can't look at anything else on screen.
The thematic undercurrents of the film, if one is generous enough to look for them, revolve around the fragility of identity and the social constructs of sanity, though calling this a exploration of madness is like calling a pie in the face a study in blunt force trauma. Hindi films have long traded in the comfort of doubling and tripling—look at Judwaa for how to actually structure this kind of chaotic nonsense so the audience doesn't feel like they're being punished for buying a ticket—yet Khan, Deshmukh, and Kapoor never find the rhythm required to make the physical comedy land. Instead of farce, we get men screaming at full volume in tight corridors while directors try to stretch a twenty-minute sketch into a two-hour endurance test.
By the time the third act descends into a chaotic free-for-all at an airport involving multiple people dressed as waiters, you aren't laughing and you aren't angry, you are simply waiting for the screen to turn black so you can check your phone without feeling rude. There is no grand moral to pull from this wreckage, no hidden brilliance waiting for a midnight rediscovery on a streaming platform thirty years down the line, just a hollow exercise in repetition that mistakes loudness for joy. The actors look exhausted, the crew looks like they wanted to go home, and the audience is left holding an empty bag.