Review: Thanks, but no thanks, darling!

Hello Darling (U/A)
Director: Manoj Tiwari
Cast: Gul Panag, Eesha Koppikar, Celina Jaitley, Javed Jaffrey, Chunky Pandey, Divya Dutta
Rating: 1/2

For a cast comprising comedy veterans, Hello Darling is a dud that neither amuses nor irks you. It simply gnaws at you that a film as imbecilic as this one could even be screened before the public. At every stage, the content of the film degenerates from silly to mindless to sheer daft.

With a concept as profound as sexual harassment at the workplace, the film could have done wonders had it been armed with a creative script and inventive acting. Sadly, it lacks both and turns out to be nothing more than a series of aesthetic and glamorous shots put together for visual indulgence.

Javed Jaffrey plays Hardick (really now) Vasu, an unscrupulous man who lets loose his libido on every female employee within sight. Candy (Jaitley) plays his sexy secretary who later teams up with the no-nonsense Mansi (Panag) and the brash Haryanvi Satvati (Koppikar) to teach their conniving boss a lesson in respecting women. In the midst of all this, Purvi (Dutta), Hardick’s pativrata Gujju-tongued wife determined to win back his attention and loyalty, gets embroiled in the plot. For the most part, they atrociously call each other bhai-behen, so you are in for a rude shock when reality strikes.

Jaitley looks and sounds awful with her lousy fringes and oh-so-fake Goan accent, while Dutta scrapes through as a Gujjuben. Panag is decent enough, gliding through sobriety and buoyancy as and when required. Koppikar's performance is much more sensible than her ludicrous wardrobe that leaves you wondering whether she is at work or at a bar.

Chunky Pandey does his job well and looks rather cute as the Elvis Presley lookalike. And Jaffrey, too, has you in splits on rare occasions when you see him as a comic element and not as the lecherous boss.

Though the music of the film hardly makes its presence felt, the cinematography is quite commendable for the artistic compositions it offers. The film admits some sexual innuendo now and then, and it also touches upon homosexuality, quite unnecessarily, a couple of times.

Content-wise, Hello Darling is painfully incompetent with outlandish ideas like the protagonists snitching a corpse from a hospital to actually abducting the boss, and finally getting away with all of it to a conventional happy ending.