Director: Rohit Shetty
Writers: Farhad Samji, Sanchit Bedre, Vidhi Ghodgaonkar
Cast: Ranveer Singh, Varun Sharma, Pooja Hegde, Sanjay Mishra, Jacqueline Fernandez, Siddharth Jadhav, Anil Mange
One of my earliest memories in life involved tears. A lot of tears. I hated seeing my mother leave after she dropped me to nursery school every morning. Watching her go made my heart sink. I would stare at the gates longingly all day. Waiting. Weeping. Hoping. More than three decades later, I found myself going through this same cycle of emotions while watching Rohit Shetty’s Cirkus, albeit in a slightly different context. Replace my mother with Sanjay Mishra – which is not a sentence I ever imagined I’d write – and you’ll get the gist. Mishra is so gloriously unhinged that the prospect of his character not being on screen often sank my heart. The Mishra-less portions made me stare at the corners of every frame longingly. Waiting, weeping, hoping for him to emerge. Mishra doing his signature stream-of-consciousness comedy – where he utters the most random insults with musical nonchalance (like calling Aalim Hakim a “human lollipop,” or pronouncing psycho as “p-sycho”) – is a sight for sore eyes, ears, heads and throats. It’s not new, but it’s only while watching Cirkus that I remember why I missed my mother so much. It’s because school was so darned dull. Mishra is the light, but he shines brighter at the end of a dark tunnel.
Of all the terms I’ve used to describe Rohit Shetty movies over the years, dull is not one of them. They’ve been loud, silly, entertaining, dumb, cheap, childish, terrible and tone-deaf. But Cirkus is just boring. Which is a remarkable feat, because the nonsensical premise – loosely, very very loosely, based on Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors – is right down Shetty’s Manmohan-Desai-for-toddlers alley. There are not one but two sets of twins separated at birth. If you’re wondering why, you’re barking up the wrong plastic tree. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you, but it has something to do with a doctor who wants to prove that upbringing and not bloodline shapes a person). So there are two Ranveer Singhs named Roy paired with two Varun Sharmas named Joy. Apologies in advance for the sounds this line might make: One Roy-Joy own a circus in Ooty, while the other Roy-Joy are businessmen from Bangalore. They are blissfully unaware of the cross connection. The only reason a circus exists in the film is to milk a stale electrocution gag – Ooty Roy is a human conductor but it’s the Bangalore Roy who feels the shock. When city Roy-Joy travel to Ooty to buy a tea plantation, the mistaken-identity mayhem begins. And refuses to end.
