Movie Review: Cirkus

 

Michael's Movie Grade: F

A painfully unfunny slapstick comedy from India. 

This film takes a very old and often used comedy idea and does nothing remotely entertaining with it. In this picture two sets of identically twins, not knowing about each other cause lots of "funny" mishaps as people constantly mistake them for one another. We have seen Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges and Charlie Chaplin (to name only a few) all do similar films. The main difference is that those films were funny, and this movie is anything but. You think with such a standard comedy idea, Cirkus could at least get a few laughs, even if they are unoriginal but this movie couldn't even do that. I don't think I laughed once watching this and that is about the worst fault a comedy film could have. Rather than relying on clever misunderstandings or silly sight gags, this film's sense of humor seems to be all the actors chewing the scenery and seeing who can overact the most. Those familiar with Indian cinema will know that these actors have all given good (and sometimes great) performances in other films. This makes it even more of a shock how annoying they can all be here. You get the feeling that everyone is working too hard to try and make an unfunny script funny, but all it does is make the comedy even worse. This is especially true of the scenes with the over-the-top slapstick humor scenes, where this comedy is killed on sight by horrible and annoying delivery. The actual jokes here are not much to write home about either. Most of the gags here feel like setup with little payoff or simply observations of how ridiculous this plot is. Again with how much this story has been used before in good comedies, it is amazing that this film could not even have one joke that slightly worked. The movie is further hurt by how bland and boring these characters are. After watching the whole nearly two-and-a-half-hour movie, I am at a loss for what the basic personalities of some of these characters even was. This is especially true of our two main characters, who are bland as all get out. This movie also has a weird storybook style look that does not seem to match anything happening on screen. 

The only thing that kind of works about this film is the song numbers, which are kind of fun. However these are not anywhere enough to make up for how terrible the rest of the picture is.