Aagey Se Right Review

Aagey Se Right is essentially a protracted episode of Shikari Shambhu. The bumbling, uniformed hunter cluelessly blundering upon one glorious success after another has provided much fodder for a comic strip that works on just one algorithm, chapter after chapter. Luckily, Aagey Se Right is slightly more layered than your average Shikari Shambhu adventure.

Dinkar Waghmare (Shreyas Talpade) is a village bloke who's been recruited into the police force in Mumbai, and is about as enthusiastic about his first day at work as a kicking, weeping 4-year-old on his way to his first day in school. Grudgingly, he sets off to Mumbai, but a few rowdy squirts on a drive to the same city, strip him of his gun.

The gun acquires a disproportionately pivotal status in Dinkar's scheme of things, and the fact that his head's incessant soundtrack consists of the voice of his mother (Bharati Achrekar) ticking him off, leads him to go to any lengths to get his gun back. The gun changes several hands throughout the film, and each time Dinkar successfully gets to it, he unknowingly prevents a major disaster from striking the city.

A parallel track has Kay Kay Menon playing a terrorist who takes Cupid very seriously when it strikes, and getting reformed in the process. The object of his love is a bar dancer Pearl (Shenaz Treasurywalla), and their romance is assisted by a Malayali don called Raghav Bhai (Vijay Maurya).

Why Aagey Se Right doesn't work is that the humour is quite low-key, and though this has the construct of a comedy, it's just not funny enough. It's like a comic strip - a comic strip makes you smile inwardly, and if it's forceful enough, makes you smile outwardly too, but it requires an enormous amount of wackiness if it has to make you actually chuckle. There are very few scenes that are of the latter sort, and they aren't enough.

That said, the film is surprisingly heart-warming. The track with Raghav Bhai and the terrorist makes for the most guffaws, though the Malayali accent seems overdone and even inaccurate. Their conversations have the smartness and the lazy pace of those fillers on Channel [V] or MTV. The terrorist's romance - it's actually his romance with romance - is well-written, with a lot of hardcore Urdu thrown in, and adds to the charm and the 'feel-good' ness.

The performances are all good. Shreyas is under-utilized, and he really should have had some more moments. And as for Kay Kay Menon, this is probably among the lightest roles he's ever done, and he brings a vague intelligence to his scenes. Actually, to be fair, intelligence is not really a problem with Aagey Se Right.

The women, other than Achrekar (who's brilliant, as usual), don't have a lot to add to the comedy, but they're hardly here for their acting skills. Shenaz is beautiful and literally lights up the screen whenever she's on, but Mahi Gill hams a bit with her reporter act, and Shruti Seth is bad.

The visuals are allright, but the songs are interestingly choreographed. The music is slightly pop-band-ish, and goes zany even, trying to fit in new kinds of sound; and there are a couple of good numbers here and there.

Here's one movie that's spotlessly clean, and that you really can take kids to, and that makes Aagey Se Right among the rarest of occurrences these days. But there's not much point in that if it means there'll be more entertainment happening off screen than on it, is there?