Gullu Dada Returns Review

Home-spun lemonade has an undeniable edge in a cola-infested market, and all the business development it requires is to simply exist - in large quantities, at that. However, if lemonade is what your entire product line spans, then fiddling around with that slice of lemon is about the only innovation you can hammer into your offering.

The Angrez and all its spin-offs, then, are mostly about a brand that just needs to keep making an appearance every year. It smacks of wasted potential - the team has a proven ability to tickle its audiences endlessly, but the target audience is still limited and there's a whole city out there that'd benefit from a product upgrade.

Gullu Dada Returns is another of those no-frills comedies imbibed with the Hyderabadi flavour, whose key source of humour is the local dialect. It revolves round a young resourceful man Aziz (Aziz Naser), who wants to have a lavish wedding reception but doesn't have enough money in his kitty.

His friends are too broke to lend him any money, so despite being the right-side-of-the-law kind of person, he is forced to borrow from the loan shark Gullu Dada (Adnan Sajid) - fully meaning to pay him back. Now Gullu Dada is a source of much terror for his borrowers. The rest of the story deals with Aziz's repayment blues.

Gullu Dada's antics - his attempts at romance, his extortion rounds, and his being outwitted by Aziz - are what lend this film the humour tag. Surprisingly, there's much less comedy in this one than you'd expect. Maybe because it's not too noisy - there is thankfully very little physical humour, no crude jokes, and a fair bit of situational and dialogue-oriented comedy.

However, how much you enjoy this flick depends on how much you live and love the Hyderabadi accent. The net result, for several, is a brief collection of mildly funny moments.

There's visible effort in weaving out an actual story instead, and make things more conventionally filmi - imagine a half-hour-long depiction of a traditional Muslim wedding, right from the engagement to the Walima.

Adnan Sajid dominating the script does well for the flick, since he puts in an energetic show. Aziz Naser has a mix of scenes that'll make him look good as an actor - including a heavy-duty emotional one. The rest of the cast is amateurish, however, especially the women. The real focus here is on the accent, though - needless to say, everyone gets that right.

The dull cinematography and the technical values keep the flick out of the reach of any new patrons - it's ultimately only those who've watched the crew's earlier work who'll end up watching it. The wedding sequence consists of interesting dholka he geet but otherwise, the soundtrack has a number of '80s-'90s film songs accompanying the comedy on display.

In sum, Gullu Dada Returns is decent and light-hearted enough to cool off, but if you're unaccustomed to the franchise, there's not much you're missing.