Director: Priyadarshan
Stars: Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty, Katrina Kaif, Sameera Reddy, Paresh Rawal, Johny Lever, Chunky Pandey, Archana Puran Singh, Neha Dhupia, Rajpal Yadav
An hour into De Dana Dan, you are at the exact same point you were the last time Priyadarshan got a bunch of people to chase their tails in an enclosed space: struggling to keep your eyes open.
Essentially, Priyadarshan makes two kinds of films. One creates high drama, with the help of a deeply-saturated canvas, filled with lush colours, flamboyant figures and large gestures. This can result in the spectacularly good (Virasat) or the really, really bad (Doli Sajaake Rakhna).
The other is the Priyan brand of comedy, which isn’t too bothered about production values or continuity, or keeping track of threads. De Dana Dan falls in the latter category, and it is, in literal terms, going south. He’s given us Hera Pheri and Hungama where the laughs came non-stop and the films were light and frothy and very, very funny. In his latest, he is making the same film — mistaken identities, star-crossed lovers and an assorted bunch going in circles. But he can’t do anything about the fatigue factor, resulting from there being nothing new about the treatment or the content, such as it is.
The Hera Pheri trio of Paresh-Akshay-Suniel have been harnessed in this tale, which is about, let’s see — a put-upon, done-in fellow (Kumar), who is a slave to a monstrous rich hag (Archana Puran Singh), and who loves a sweet, rich girl (Katrina Kaif); a courier-delivery man (Suniel Shetty) and his sweet, rich girl (Sameera Reddy); a bogus businessman (Paresh Rawal) and his foolish son (Chunky Pandey); and a brassy hooker (Neha Dhupia). Wait, we are not even half done: after a point, when several other bit parts show up to claim their 15 minutes of screen time, De Dana Dan starts feeling like a railway platform where people jump on and off, without caring about what’s being left behind.
When you have too many characters to keep track of, you lose them. Kumar spends the second half locked in a cupboard, which is better than his fate in the first half, where he spends most of his time getting his posterior kicked by Puran Singh - repeatedly. When the director does remember to free him, he is sent to execute a completely inconsequential “item” number with Kaif: How do you otherwise justify having the two girls on board?
You also end up with an elongated rubberband of a film— at nearly three hours, it is much too long, the laughs having dried up long back, even if the climax is watery: a rooftop pool bursts open and the hotel the characters are in is awash with wet bodies and forced banter.
The best lines are reserved, as has become the norm, for Rawal. He marches up and down corridors, flinging his lines about energetically, occasionally getting us to crack a laugh. The rest is a matter of passing the time, somehow
