After Bhool Bhulaiya, Akshay Kumar and Priyadarshan are back with another haunted palace and another ghost. But when the first movie`s lurking, unseen, mysterious entity is replaced by a poorly rendered CGI ghost, is there any comparison?
The film introduces us to Arjun Acharya (Akshay Kumar), who lives in London. His younger sister Meera (Mithila Palkar) is about to get married, but cannot find an appropriate destination wedding location in India that her fiancé’s pandit would agree to. Things fall in place miraculously when a lawyer shows up at their door, informing them that their grandfather is dead and has bequeathed all his wealth, which includes a haveli, to them.
Grateful and befuddled (since he was unaware of the existence of his grandfather), Arjun heads to Mangalpur to survey the property and prepare it for the wedding. There, he encounters Shantaram (Asrani), the caretaker, who warns him that the haveli is a bhooth bangla. No marriage can take place within Mangalpur, as in it resides a bat-like rakshas called Vadhusur, who abducts newly-wed brides. He launches into the lore of how Vadhusur was born and why he turned vengeful, while Arjun is disbelieving.
He calls a wedding planner, Jagdish (Paresh Rawal), who arrives with his electrician nephew Sunder (Rajpal Yadav). While the reunion of this trio should have been a rollicking affair, all it elicits are the occasional chuckles.
Odd (and supposedly comic) things happen: A ghostly entity grabs Rajpal Yadav by the legs while he`s sleeping, Paresh Rawal`s lungi catches fire, a mysterious recording of Kahin Deep Jale Kahin Dil reverberates in the long, shadowy passages, and the flames of lanterns suddenly dwindle. These episodes serve to give Jagdish and Sunder the jitters. Arjun, by now a bit worried, tells all his freaking-out employees that these are the machinations of Shantaram, who wants to drive him back to London. And so the wedding will take place, but what of Vadhusur?
In the first half, Akshay Kumar succumbs to his need to bung in comedy by spouting loud dialogues at the top of his voice (I feel sorry for his throat) and raucously hitting everyone who gets in his way. In fact, Sunder is slapped so many times that Yadav gets to utter his famous ‘Main koi mandir ka ghanta hoon’ dialogue again.
Priyadarshan`s humour has always been heavy-handed, his plots hare-brained, his characters whackadoodles, but his previous films worked because he knew how to combine the crazy and dynamic energies to create a laugh riot. Here, the gags he resorts to make you want to pull your hair out – for instance, a series of misunderstandings lead Arjun to think Sunder is a lecher, ogling at a woman whose pallu conveniently keeps slipping. The joke, really, is on us.
When the central figure of horror, Vadhusur, is just a man in a Batman-esque costume, how are you supposed to get scared? Even the jump scares are few, punctuated with overbearing background music in a poor attempt to spook.
His Bhool Bhulaiya was novel in its idea because it rejected superstition and opted for a psychological framing; the cure wasn’t in faith but in medical science. Another horror-comedy, Stree, worked because of its subversion, allowing a woman to be a threat to all of mankind and confining men to their homes instead. So when Priyadarshan returns to the genre after almost 20 years, the last thing you expect is this outrageous attempt to cash in on the genre`s popularity with a dated and hackneyed plot.
