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guy comes into the comedy quite early to serve Sameera Reddy,
a car showroom owner, a notice. He smiles and delivers his murderous
missive, turns around, frowns and vanishes.
The thing about Ashwini Dheer's flaky but funny farce is that
it has accomplished comic actors in the smallest of parts. Watch
out for the seasoned Marathi actress who plays Tusshar's mother.
All she wishes for her son is that he excels in his work, namely
killing people.
She
sends him off on his first contract-killing mission in Pondicherry
(where most of the knock-kneed, but never hackneyed action unfolds).
Tusshar ends up at the doorstep of the wrong person - a loud Tamilian
scrambled-brained lingerie designer. Esha Deol is cute and loud
as the designer.
Lingerie, or "kachcha-banyan", as Paresh Rawal insists
on calling them plays a big part in covering up the broadly exposed
bases in this situational comedies, where the best moments are
those that actors take over from the screenwriter and make their
own.
Mukesh Tiwari displays an unusual penchant for parody (forget
the unfunny "Buddha Mar Gaya") adding an extra "s"
to every English word, is like Rakhi Sawant gone wrong. Tiwari's
sidekicks have their own subplots. One of them makes bombs that
never go off on time.
Luckily, "123" gets its timing right most of the time.
It's a war of nerves between the writer and audience, as the one
tries to outpace the other. Eventually, the audience does get
tired of watching three guys with the same name, Laxmi Narayan,
getting mixed up in situations where spoken words give nothing,
and yet everything away.
But our fatigue is slackened by the unslackened physical energy
that the characters bring to the minutest of moments. Ashwini
Dheer comes from the television sitcom culture.
Nowhere does his framing or shots give away his cramped antecedents.
He enjoys the large open spaces that his crowded cast populates
with parodic panache, pouncing on the preposterousness in the
plot with famished energy.
The cast is uniformly in sync with the director's vision, not
allowing the shards of farce to be frittered away unused. The
smallest of cast member knows the job on hand.
But Suniel Shetty gets as far away from his macho image as humanly
possible as the timid and punctual Laxmi Narayan on the run with
a reined-in enthusiasm. "We've seen Suniel do comedy the
before. But he was never so straight-faced and sharp. He is a
surprise."
Tusshar Kapoor as Mama's pet out to make his first kill is extremely
accomplished. He labours over the loud comedy and gets the volume
right. Paresh Rawal is selling lingerie with uninhibited pride
and is not the outright winner as he usually is in these comedies.
Has Paresh become complacent? Or have Suniel, Tusshar and company
got better at the funny stuff? If only director Dheer had avoided
the excessive crudity especially in Suniel's prolonged sequence
in the public loo with the cheesy hit man.
"Main nahin pukdunga," he protests in panic as the other
actor (another small-time scene stealer in this festival of interesting
actors) reaches inside his pants. Panic-attacks dominate lives
of these flustered characters.
These lovable losers try to sell lingerie and cars, while the
director repackages the Shakespearean comedy of errors in a new
autopilot manoeuvre that doesn't quite have you holding your sides.
But chuckles don't stop.
The shortest role in the history of the comic farce goes to Upen
Patel and Tanissha. They come in with a song and go out with a
bang. In-between, they lose their grip over the giggle trip.
Director Ashwin Dheer quits while he's ahead.
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