Dhamaal 4

It doesn’t take a genius to know that Dhamaal 4, directed by Indra Kumar, isn’t a good movie. At 2 hours and 20 minutes long, it’s simply a collection of gags, stitched together with weaker connective tissue than a physiotherapist could detect in the body of a 90-year-old. The film begins with a suspiciously AI-generated-looking prologue about pirates — you read that correctly. Years later, a collection of greedy buffoons sets out on a quest to locate treasure that these pirates left hidden.

Let us begin with a simple question: how many sight gags does a vacuous slapstick comedy need in order to sustain itself over a runtime of two and a half hours, especially when each one of them takes next to no time to overstay its welcome? The answer is provided sans ambiguity by the four writers of the Indra Kumar-directed Dhamaal 4 (Paritosh Painter, Vedd Prakash, Bunty Rathore and Balvinder Singh Suri). There is absolutely no limit to the silliness that can be crammed into a concoction as unabashedly birdbrained as this. No matter how much the makers of the fourth instalment of the long-running Dhamaal franchise throw into its bottomless pit of mind-numbing inanities, nothing lands in one piece. If that were not enough, the film ends with the promise of another Dhamaal. One can only shudder at the thought!