3 Thay Bhai Review

If this is comedy, we'd need some weed to go with that. Because it's not easy to watch an entire film about grown siblings playing Tom & Jerry in the guise of eccentric humour.

The super-accomplished Om Puri, Bollywood's official go-to man for the flatulent sourpuss uncle / father / elder something, plays lead in what is meant to be an unconventional comedy. That's great news, but if the director's idea of harnessing Om Puri's talent was to shove in our faces for 2.5 hours a grumpy middle-aged man who repeatedly screams at and physically assaults his younger brothers, then we have news: it's not funny.

3 Thay Bhai is about 3 hard-core Punjabi brothers Chiksy (Om Puri), Happy (the gifted Deepak Dobriyal) and Fancy (Shreyas Talpade) who cannot stand one another. That translates to "scenes straight from the school play ground where the bully does horrible things to kids who didn't agree with him".

Now their dadaji passes away and leaves behind a will with some conditions to be fulfilled for them to invest his staggering amount of property. They're now in a bungalow in a godforsaken freezing place in Shimla, where they must stay for a couple of days along with their dadaji's ashes.

The film is about their misadventures (weed et al) in the broken-down house, and their squabbles and nasty fights. Actually, it's only the grouchy Chiksy who's the intolerant one among the 3 - he's cranky, whiny, sarcastic and even violent.

The intellectual quotient of this movie lies in the slow unravelling of what happens to the 3 brothers once they get together. There's a plot, a few twists, and a purpose to everything that happens. Plus, Om Puri's sarcasm is great fun.

However, while it's always wonderful to see the man say anything on screen, after a while in this film, the nastiness gets to you. The comedy degrades to the physical kind you watch on Tom & Jerry - imagine humans sticking each others' heads into an oven (and they're brothers, for God's sake) - and there's a lot of shrieking accompanying all this.

Dobriyal is good, but Shreyas is given bad lines and painful broken English (and a bad hairdo). The actors who play the policemen spoil the show, both with their acting and their roles.

The settings are suitably claustrophobic. Half the story takes place in one night, and the run-down house and the raging snowstorm outside make for an interesting effect. The background music is Punjabi, and is mostly unconventional and funky.

And on the whole, skip this one for funnier results.