Genre: Comedy
Director: Ashwini Dheer
Cast: Suniel Shetty, Tusshar Kapoor, Paresh Rawal, Upen Patel, Sameera Reddy, Esha Deol, Tanisha, Neetu Chandra
Storyline: Three guys with a common name show up in Pondicherry as confusion ensues.
Bottomline: Watch it drunk with your chaddi-buddies
Confession: One, Two, Three isn’t half as bad as people tell you it is.
Obviously, not many would like to admit they laughed at the drop of an undergarment.
Ashwini’s script is a factory of undergarment jokes tailor-made for mass appeal.
If you laughed out loud for the ‘Yeh To Bada Toing Hai’ ad campaign or ‘the Rupa ke Underwear aur Banian’ MTV gag, you are going to love this extra-large comedy of errors involving the underworld, an underwear seller and an employee under pressure.
Paresh Rawal revels in his role as the old-fashioned salesman on the threshold of change as his son wants to give the business a modern feel. Lakshminarayan 1 sizes up his customers with natural flair, never under-estimating their needs. While he’s actually supposed to meet Tamil-spouting lingerie designer (Esha Deol), thanks to the confusion of two other of his name-sakes staying in the hotel, Paresh Rawal hooks up with vintage car-seller Sameera, who likes to keep her advertising brief and effective.
Suniel Shetty is such a talented actor that at no point do you realise he’s trying to rip off Mr.Bean’s antics. Lakshminarayan 2 has a good thing going until humour by repetition takes its toll on you. This is easily one of his best roles till date. He has four lines including a joke in the movie. And he’s made to repeat that joke 40 times in the course of car-hunting for his boss, only to become hunted by the underworld being mistaken for Lakshminarayan 3.
Tusshar Kapoor (the third Lakshminarayan, the hit-man) finally realizes that the only way he can play a gangster is in a farce. Bagging his first killing contract, all he ends up knocking down are a couple of coconuts. Jitender Junior gets to romance Dharmendra Junior until the confusion gets compounded further… the kind of comedy Crazy Mohan and Kamal Hassan would’ve kicked butt with.
But Ashwini tries too hard and too many things. Somewhere between all this, for your viewing pleasure, there’s Tanisha who doesn’t seem to care two hoots about the length of her role or wardrobe and Upen Patel as her partner-in-crime… The crime being stealing the diamond and hiding it in a petrol tank… Moral of the story: Always choose clothes big enough to hide a stone.
Ridiculous? Wait until you hear Neetu Chandra and her team of cops talk in chaste Haryanvi in Pondicherry or the bad guy (called Papa… duh, the Indian Godfather) with a fixation for adding S to every word or the trained, jinxed bomb specialist or the rival Don obsessively compulsive about bad poetry…
In spite of that huge line-up of stars and ensemble, the film looks like it’s shot on a gee-string budget.
With the volume of jokes touching a new high, the quality doesn’t seem to matter. Even at a success rate of one is to ten, you have about 30-40 laughs in the film. Which is not bad at all if you just want to have a good time. There are a lot of moments where timing salvages the saddest of jokes and there are the silliest of lines delivered with great conviction… often reminding you about ‘Andaz Apna Apna,’ only that this is way more downmarket… So downmarket, that this is down there with ‘Kya Kool Hai Hum’ or ‘Dhamaal’.
Not that downmarket is a bad thing, David Dhawan used to rule that roost. But Ashwini clearly has more potential. If only he knew when to stop. And where.
MADRAS INK. 