Mastiii 4

Farrukh Dhondy and Milap Milan Zaveri's story has all the trappings of a laugh-a-minute riot. Farrukh Dhondy and Milap Milan Zaveri's screenplay falls short and is riddled with very few jokes that land as intended. Milap Milan Zaveri and Abhinav Vaidya's dialogues raise laughs in some places. Sadly, a few of them have been tweaked courtesy the Censor Board. Milap Milan Zaveri's direction is okay. On the positive side, visually, the film looks fresh and has been shot in an A-grade manner. Even the opening credits are appealing. There's not a single dull moment as a lot is happening in the film every minute. The songs are poor but are well picturized. A few jokes definitely raise a lot of laughs and will be enjoyed by the masses and frontbenchers.

There's no surprise how lazy and pointless Mastiii 4 is, but its biggest problem is the noticeable lack of energy, both in the way the jokes are written and in how Deshmukh, Oberoi, and Shivdasani deliver them. Deshmukh plays a zookeeper who proudly calls himself a 'Master Mater' because he helps the zoo animals mate. In his introductory scene, he is dressed in a lioness costume, trying to lure the lion toward the real lioness to get him aroused. What could go wrong goes wrong, and it's all downhill from there. There's plenty of crude vulgarity, which is expected for this genre, but it's executed with such flatness that it feels aimless and desperate, even by the film's low standards. The tiring parade of jokes plays out like a bad sitcom, full of nothing but puerile gags.

The writing is noticeably weak, and moments where the script could have genuinely scored are squandered by a lazy approach. The cast seems to be performing in a vacuum, surrounded by the idea of humour, yet relying entirely on loud delivery and repetitive antics rather than sharp, organic comedy.

But the second half, when new male characters played by Tusshar Kapoor, Shaad Randhawa and Nishant Malkani are introduced to amp up the chaos, the madcap humour gets a bit better, but it still isn’t enough to make the audience laugh out loud. What does work is the physical comedy in the film played out by the three male leads, Riteish, Aftab and Vivek. The slapstick works in parts, especially when the three men put on over-the-top costumes and behave like bumbling idiots. The girls – played by Elnaaz, Shreya and Ruhi look fabulous but have very little to do apart from wearing fancy clothes and looking clueless. At 2 hours and 22 minutes, Mastiii 4 feels stretched and the gags keep on coming, but don’t always land in the way they should.