Hello Darling Review

We could call Hello Darling dumb, cheap, lame, vulgar and offensive, but we'll stick to one word - hideous. In a movie whose high point is a boss' name plate that reads Harddick, it's easy to expect that very little will go right, and you're not proved wrong.

Javed Jaffrey plays this badly-written character Hardik, a sleazy boss whose advances on his female colleagues lie somewhere between obnoxious and plain disgusting. He tramples all over Mansi's (Gul Panag) career ambitions, hints to newbie Satvati (Isha Koppikar) that she must sleep with him if she's to be approved of, and broadcasts his extra-marital romps with secretary Candy (Celina Jaitley) all over office.

His wife Purvi (Divya Dutta) is an airhead who couldn't see through her husband's adventures until the neighbourhood maidservants' gang raises a hue and cry with her. She attempts to set him right by complaining to a Pati Sudharak Samiti. Her plans coincide with the office ladies' plot to teach their boorish boss a lesson.

A lot of chaos was intended, but since this is no Govinda flick, nor an Akshay Kumar caper, nor a Priyadarshan product, the film doesn't adhere to even basic standards of humour and IQ. The crudeness of the boss-employee dynamics apart, the women in this movie are made to seem dumber than a box of hair, and nothing they do seems bad enough - it just gets worse by the minute.

Logic is fatally torn apart. And like we said, the idiocy never seems to peak. Whether it's the scenes in which the trio smuggles a corpse out of hospital thinking it's Hardik's, or the conversations they generally have amongst themselves throughout the movie, the movie reeks of mind-numbing incapacity on the part of the writing.

Javed Jaffrey can't even take charge of the proceedings, given how empty the writing is. There might have been scope for him to do what he's good at, but a limp set of gags takes all the fun out of expecting anything from the man.

The women are a disaster, to say the least. Bad acting coupled with dim-witted lines and jokes is not getting compensated by all the suggestive clothing the characters wear to work, and it's a pity the movie relies more on the girls than on the comedian in the centre of it all.

Chunky Pandey plays Candy's boyfriend, stuck in a far-from-funny situation. His being an accessory to the script isn't even entertaining, because he's relentlessly beaten up for no reason by the afore-mentioned Pati Sudharak Samiti.

A couple of irrelevant songs for the bathroom breaks complete the picture, but if you're aiming at avoiding this movie, we think you should start at the ticket counter.