Poster Boys movie review: The joke is on us!

Cast: Sunny Deol, Bobby Deol, Sonali Kulkarni, Shreyas Talpade 
Director: Shreyas Talpade

Imagine a 20-minute television sketch stretched to last 128 minutes, fitted out with the world’s silliest fatuous jokes? Even if it is a thin storyline, there isn’t any dearth of possibilities to flesh out any idea and develop it into a quirky plot. But then, it must be off-the-wall, for sure.

Shreyas Talpade’s directorial debut Poster Boys results in a colossal comedic misfire with laugh-deficient screenplay that counts on gags so hoary, they’d make SMS exchanging schoolboys cringe. The business of competently executing a joke seems utterly beyond the grasp of Talpade and writers Bunty Rathore, Paritosh Painter and story Sameer Patil. The talented actor who gave us films like Iqbal and Welcome to Sajjanpur, teams up with the ageing Deol brothers - both Sunny and Bobby- whose faded sheen fails to rekindle old fire and reduces them to a quivering heap.   

All hell breaks loose for three men, school teacher Vinay Sharma (Bobby Deol), Arjun Singh (Shreyas Talpade) and Jaagavar Chaudhary (Sunny Deol), when they find their pictures on a poster promoting 'sterilisation’ vasectomy, without their consent, of course. For men, one of whom is about to get married, this could land them in a confusing mess. There‘s another (Vinay) whose wife longs to have a son after she has had two daughters. The third one, Chaudhary, has a sister getting engaged and the would-be in-laws would have none of his pleadings pacify them. Now, all they need to do is to clear their reputations, and yes, you got it right! 

Prove their masculinity too. Sounds messy? You bet. We could have expected a laugh-riot had the film been helmed by competent writers and a director. We have had worse experiences many a times, and more stupefying follies are likely to come in future, but it's impossible to imagine how they'll beat this one for its staggering idiocy and puerility.

Once the world turns upside down for the three men, and their humiliating journey begins as family, neighbours and relatives get to know about their so-called ‘nasbandi,’ they run from pillar to post trying to rectify the mishap and the ridicule they have been subjected to. As the three men start investigating how their pictures landed as part of the government department’s massive plans to initiate a social campaign, their attempts to uncover the truth gets more jumbled up. From thereon, the writers of the film don’t have the faintest idea where to go as we come to know that the poster was to be hurriedly printed at the behest of the minister who gave orders for his subordinates to follow. 

The film bills itself with a baseline that screams, “We have got ourselves sterilized, you, too, should get it done.” With such a supposedly witty line, viewers will have trouble figuring out what kind of movie this was meant to be.

Sunny Deol and Sonali Kulkarni try to present some degree of sanity as a couple even as at every given opportunity he is seen either breaking a lock with his hands or pulling out a grill, reminding us of the famous Dhai kilo ka haath being capable of yanking out not just a handpump, but just about anything and everything.  Bobby Deol unselfconsciously struts around in a nightsuit, and gives us some moments of comic relief in this tired plot. Talpade suffers from his own amateurishness, and weak writing, and if any zaniness that he and the rest of the cast could have had together is thrown off by an over-the-top attempt at stretching the film to maddening proportions. What stops this dreadful comedy from qualifying as a historic failure is its measure of pretension: not once does it attempt to have any semblance of believability, and underlines gags even as it tries to cram jokes on family planning and gender inequality into the script. It’s surprising that Sony Pictures has elected to release such a bad movie in the midst of the hottest box office season!