Team FC
Subtlety is not the film’s forte. Neither is clarity, characterization, coherence or anything else that any reasonable person requires. Sushant Singh Rajput's earnestness is horribly miscast in this film that couldn't care less about craft. He is trying too hard to be a character that is trying too little.
The third installment of the four-director anthology after Bombay Talkies (2013) and Lust Stories (2018), is arguably the least impressive ‘whole’ of them all. The directors take the horror genre too seriously, and the “ghost” too literally.
There's an entire genre of mainstream Hindi filmmaking that disguises artistic incompetence as an ode to campy '70s Bollywood - this is one of those films. Fourteen years after testing that thin kitschy line between parody and disaster with Jaan-E-Mann, editor-director Shirish Kunder crosses that line with what was perhaps the worst film of 2020.
What do you do with a tired social entertainer that forgets to entertain? Sardar Ka Grandson ends up becoming a crashing bore in the guise of a crowd-pleasing Netflix production.
The problem with a film like this is that the actors end up playing performers instead of performative people. And the stories end up adopting the sensationalized tone they set out to critique. It doesn’t help that Kartik Aaryan, despite his best efforts, still appears to be a monologue away from turning Dhamaka into a romantic comedy.
A matchmaker and a divorce attorney fall in love in this film that was supposed to be a rom-com. Here is Plan C: Skip this movie and rewatch your favourite holiday films.
At the heart of Chor Nikal Ke Bhaga is the premise that the dating scene is so abysmal for straight women in India that one will ignore all the red flags a man is waving simply because he’s coming across as only creepy (as opposed to downright awful).