'Teen Thay Bhai' is unrelenting torture

Film: Teen Thay Bhai
Director: Mrigdeep Singh Lamba
Cast: Om Puri, Deepak Dobriyal and Shreyas Talpade
Rating: *

You know how you walk in to watch a film without too many expectations and are taken by surprise. A film that doesn’t always arrive with a multi-crore marketing campaign backing it, or which doesn’t have big stars, or the mandatory item song, but which strikes a chord because it has a good story to tell. A film termed as a ‘surprise package’.
 
Teen Thay Bhai (TTB) is not that film. If anything, it’s the opposite. Even with no expectations attached to it, you will be disappointed enough with TTB to want to swear off watching films for a long time after.

Personally, I wanted some sort of compensation in return for sitting through the film, so I could warn you against it. I toyed with the idea of strongly recommending it only so you too experience what I did. Why should I be the only one? And this is not even an Akshay Kumar film.

This one is a ‘Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra Picture’, instead. Or ‘ROMP’. The humour in the banner’s name aside, the only reason the film probably got made was because the Rang De Basanti maker saw ‘promise’ in debutant director Mrigdeep Singh Lamba’s script, and got PVR Pictures to back it. We often complain about corporates making star-driven films that have little content to offer. Why someone would back TTB, which has neither, is baffling.
 
The story is the kind that would probably be rejected by a television production house – three brothers at loggerheads stand to make a fortune by spending three nights together on a hill-top bungalow. The only way the flimsy plot could come to life is through some truly hilarious situations and some witty writing. Both are absent.

What’s pitiable is that three actors known for just that – their acting – are made to look terrible at their craft. Puri, if it can be said so, irritates. Dobriyal manages to hold his own through the madness, while Talpade seems to go through the motions.
 
Teen Thay Bhai is bad to the extent that you can’t even enjoy it, or laugh at the inanities. Instead, it’s like submitting yourself to two hours of unrelenting, unwavering, merciless torture. And that’s unacceptable in a film which is neither an Aneez Bazmee comedy nor a Ram Gopal Varma horror.

In my last week’s review of Thank You, I said the film was only slightly better than No Problem, which had a farting gorilla. This one has a farting Om Puri. And it’s no less disturbing.
 
Watch Teen Thay Bhai only if you have a death wish.