Rohit Shetty's Cirkus is so awful, it makes the pandemic look like an escape route

Let’s not beat around the bush. Rohit Shetty’s Cirkus is so execrable, it hands-down qualifies as the worst film of the year. And I have in mind such bilgy gems as Dehati Disco, Phone Bhoot and Shamshera. In fact, after seeing Cirkus, I forgave Anurag Kashyap for No Smoking and Karan Johar for Kalank.

Every major filmmaker has that one incontrovertibly embarrassing work that he would like to forget and hope his children would never get to see it. Cirkus is the one for Rohit Shetty. It’s so downright cretinous and unfunny, it gives an all-new definition to the adage about mindless entertainment.

And to think that Shetty and his writers (Farhad Samji, Sanchit Bedre, Vidhi Godgaonkar, Yunus Sajawal) claim to be inspired by Shakespeare’s Comedy Of Errors! Were the bard alive he would sue for the su-su done on his comedy. There are many clownish characters in Cirkus and a whole lot of circus antics. But nothing to even remotely suggest a connection with Shakespeare or even Raj Kapoor’s Mera Naam Joker, which had created the world of the circus so vividly.

Set in the 1970s, Shetty, who we have to admit, knows the commercial Hindi cinema in and out, makes terrific use of nostalgia music like Mohd Rafi’s Badan pe sitare lapete hue (when the hero gets electrified) and Lata Mangeshkar’s Aa jaan-e-jaan and Tu kya jaane wafa when the heroines get their aunties in a budge.

There is also an excellent background score by Amar Mohile which captures rather ably the nerve wracking madness that is served up in this gooey gourmet of fetid chuckles and airheaded giggles.

Crowded with a cacophony of characters all clamouring to be heard, Cirkus is the kind of rare travesty that induces a gag order from anyone who has ever squirmed at competent actors—and there is a whole truckload of them running around shrieking and stomping on this film—making an ass of themselves.

As one of the innumerable characters(if we can call these caricatures by that creative name) in Cirkus is fond of saying, ‘Oh shock!’. The cartoonish character named Momo who misuses English words(just as Shetty who misuses his directorial hegemony to ladle out such trashy laughter challenges) is actually one of the heroes of this rapidfire romp. There is so much Siddharth Jadhav’s Momo’s hysterical slap-‘sick’ humour that I began to wonder if he is one of the producers here.

Even Sanjay Mishra has more of a say in this slanted tired satire than Ranveer Singh and Varun Sharma who play twins separated from their actual brothers at birth by a doctor (Murli Sharma) whose certificate for medical practice should be immediately revoked.

I would say Rohit Shetty too needs to be reined-in. In Cirkus, he has lost the plot completely. The intended humour generated from mistaken identity is drowned in acres of verbal diarrhea most of it highly unfunny. Some of the actors like Anil Charanjeett, Ashwini Kalsekar and Johnny Lever are far superior to the material given to them un this motormouthed monstrosity where mirth is stillborn and the only people who seem entertained by the jinxed hijinks are the characters on screen.

Oh, the film has two heroines. Both playing bimbos in sarees and makeup supposedly from the 1970s. Production designers Swapnil Bhalerao and Madhur Madhvan and cinematographer Jomom T John have some very peculiar ideas of nostalgia. The outdoors, the railway stations, the home décor and the characters’ makeup resembles those pop-out fairytale books that children loved one upon a time.

Circkus is like a swanky garish automobile crammed full with a family ready for a picnic. But the ignition fails. If at the end of the year Bollywood is still wondering why audiences are not going into movie theatres, look hard at Cirkus. It has all all the answers. In gaudy Technicolor.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.

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