Coolie No 1 cast: Varun Dhawan, Sara Ali Khan, Paresh Rawal, Sahil Vaid, Shikha Talsania, Jaaved Jaaferi, Rajpal Yadav, Johny Lever, Manoj Joshi, Anil Dhawan, Bharti Achrekar
Director Coolie no. 1: David Dhawan
Coolie rating no. 1: A star
In 1995, director David Dhawan took his favorite actor to play a lucky coolie who falls in love with a rich girl. Her arrogant father, who wants “only a prince, no poor”, for her boyfriend “drunk” is the obstacle, but no Bollywood father can stand in the way of true love and strong comedy and song dance, right?
The combination of Dhawan-Govinda-Karisma-Kader Khan-Shakti Kapoor gave us a film of his times, full of gags that border on lack of taste and dubious lyrics. It turned into one of the biggest hits of the year, which gave us Rangeela and DDLJ, because Govinda’s table man was good. At that time, in his old age, he could wear almost anything – faded jokes, purple suits, and no one could push a pool as he could, not even his beautiful ladies.
But that came back a quarter of a century ago, and it seems that filmmakers have forgotten that the world has changed. So is Bollywood. When you see Varun Dhawan, who channeled Govinda in many of his films much better, he goes almost the same way, saying almost the same lines, there is no laughter, only despair.
Minor changes are not fresh. The previous film was set in a village: Karisma was a gaon-ki-gori dressed in ghaghra, Govinda wanted to set up a cement factory. In this, Gaon became Goa. Instead of the factory, it is a port, and Sara Ali Khan is a city girl in minis and sharp bottles. But the stupidity that was celebrated at the highest height and the rat-a-tat speed with which the whole thing was executed, which David Dhawan used to do so well, is missing.
The time for paper plots is long gone. It is painful to see acceptable actors going through jerky scenes and terrible laughter tracks. Varun and Sara dancing to the still popular songs (“Tujhko mirchi lagi toh main kya karoon”) take you straight back to OG. The only one who makes a table of his character, played by the inimitable Kader Khan in the original, is Paresh Rawal. His heavy-handed father uses a light touch, which is exactly what is needed in this kind of brainless comedy. Dhawan Jr did much better under his father’s wand. And, unfortunately, the fierce Sara Ali Khan is as empty as the script.
We can do with laughter in these dark times, but not like that, without spirit, without flair.