Coolie
No. 1 Movie Review | Movie´s Comedy Remake is Bigger but not better
Coolie
No. 1 Movie Review
I
don’t say this about films often, but I don’t think there was a single frame in
Coolie No. 1 that didn’t annoy me. It
started with the animated opening credits in which we get the back story of how
a coolie named Raju became a coolie. This
film is a remake of the 1995 Govinda-starrer, also called Coolie No.1, which
itself was a remake of the 1993 Tamil film Chinna Mapillai. The earlier Hindi film was also directed by
David Dhawan. In that film, we didn’t get any backstory. But here we are told that Raju was separated
from his mother as a child. He stepped
out of the train, which left before he could get back on and was then raised on
the train station. Govinda was a coolie
on a bus station, but making it a train station allows this film to reference
the iconic Amitabh Bachchan-starrer
Coolie, directed by Manmohan Desai. In
fact, an animated Bachchan appears wearing the famous 786 billa. He asks Raju, ‘tumhare paas kya hai’ and Raju
replies, ‘mere paas maa nahin hai’. The
Bollywood referencing and winking self-awareness felt so formulaic, that I
groaned aloud and the film had barely begun.
As it turned out, the opening credits were the most benign part of this
train-wreck. The rest of it is even more
harebrained, distasteful and unfunny.
The
earlier Coolie No. 1 had a cheery lunacy and a degree of innocence, that
allowed the ridiculous plot to play out as an extended joke. Govinda’s effortless clowning helped viewers
to ignore the more problematic parts of the film. But in 2020, the narrative is dated and
offensive on so many levels. Coolie No.
1 is about how a matchmaker takes revenge on a greedy man by making his
daughter marry a coolie. Raju pretending
to be Kunwar Raj Pratap Singh marries Sara, who is so dim-witted that she
doesn’t ask any questions. His money
makes everything else irrelevant. On
their wedding night, she won’t have sex till he promises to take her to his
bungalow.
The
screenplay has been written by Rumi Jaffrey, who also wrote the original Hindi
film. He randomly inserts action
sequences. At one point, Raju rescues a
deaf boy who's wandered on to the train tracks.
This is to establish that Raju might be duplicitous, but he is a bona
fide hero. But the real damage is done
by Farhad Samji’s dialogues. The greedy
father who was named Hoshiyar Chand in 1995, is now a Goa hotelier named
Jeffrey Rozario. This was perhaps done
so the character could say lines like: heaven on the docks man, whiskey on the
rocks man. In another scene, Raju
introduces himself as: Orphan but I like to have fun. And in another, Rozario says: Gucci, sacchi
mucchi. The low IQ humor will make you cringe.
So will the character of Rozario who is basically selling his daughters
to the richest men he can find. At one
point, he is sending his other daughter for a vacation with Raju, who is
pretending to be Kunwar’s twin. Rozario
asks her: bag mein dala chhota chhota frock?
Soon after this, his two daughters are in hotel rooms with Raju flitting
in between the two of them and the dad
is peering in from the outside to make sure that there is enough action.
People
who stammer, lisp or are overweight are punchlines for jokes. And the women are just props. It hurts to see Sara Ali Khan reduce herself to
dancing vigorously and making faces. Her
Manish Malhotra-wardrobe has more complexity than her character. And then there’s Varun Dhawan in brownface because
obviously a coolie can’t be fair-skinned.
He throws himself into the job of being a proper Hindi film hero – doing
comedy, action and romance with gusto. But
this film needs him to combine the effortless comic timing of Govinda with the
larger-than-life presence of Amitabh Bachchan.
He also mimics Mithun Chakraborty, Shah Rukh Khan and other actors. Basically, Varun has to be an all-in-one,
which is an impossible assignment. This
film is a remake of a remake, so it’s not surprising that we get remixed
versions of the two chartbusters from Coolie No. 1 – Main toh raste pe jaa raha tha and Husn hai
suhana. In the first song, there’s a
shot of Varun and Sara dancing on an upper deck of a pink double decker bus
with nuns swaying to the music behind them.
What does this mean? I have no idea. And neither does this film. You can watch Coolie No. 1 on Amazon Prime
Video.
Coolie No. 1 Movie Cast
Sara Ali Khan Kuhu
Varun Dhawan Raju Coolie
Paresh Rawal Surinder Chopra
Rajpal Yadav Cheeku Sharma
Javed Jaffrey Abhinav Singh
Johnny Leaver Deepak Chaudhary
Sahil Vail Harsh Singh
Coolie No. 1 Movie Info
Geners: Comedy
Language: Hindi
Release date: 25 December 2020 (Amazon Prime
Video)
Director : David Dhawan
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