RADHE

What more can one say about Radhe that hasn’t been said already? Salman Khan has always been accused of sleepwalking through many a mindless film (Bajrangi Bhaijaan and, to some extent, Sultan are recent exceptions), but in Radhe, he takes the nonchalance — and we don’t mean that in a cool or complimentary way — to a whole new low. The Prabhu Deva film, billed to ‘entertain’ a nation stuck in the middle of a pandemic, made most reach out for an aspirin, with reviews reading more like rants.

And with good reason. The desi adaptation of the Korean action entertainer The Outlaws (and also positioned as the follow-up to Salman’s Wanted) tweaked and twisted the original in ways that rendered it unwatchable. Stringing together a host of familiar (and very stale) tropes — Salman sending a dozen men flying into the air, Salman romancing a heroine (in this case, Disha Patani) half his age, Salman cracking jokes that only make sense to him, Salman breaking the fourth wall, Salman affording annual employment to Bigg Boss contestants — Radhe is a film that should have never have been made. But wait, maybe it should have been... otherwise where would the memes, which are definitely more entertaining than the film, have come from?

MRS SERIAL KILLER

Exactly a year after it released with the sole intention of assaulting its audience in ways unimaginable, I am still trying to figure out Mrs Serial Killer. Fret not, I am no masochist, but I really want to know who greenlit this Shirish Kunder film and why it still exists (on Netflix, if you are suddenly feeling adventurous). Clearly escaping every kind of quality control check — directing, editing, cinematography, acting, you name it — Mrs Serial Killer was a disaster, not surprisingly frontlined by Jacqueline Fernandez. Things progressed from ugly to unbearable pretty quickly in Mrs Serial Killer, which tried everything from camp to comedy, gore to glam, but came up woefully short in every department.

Manoj Bajpayee hammed it up like there was no tomorrow in a film which was peppered with cringeworthy lines like, “Tu koi candle nahin hai ki use karne se khatam ho jaayegi” and Bajpayee’s Mrityunjoy thundering, “Don’t call me Joy. I am not a f***ing ice cream. Call me Mrityu”. My favourite? “Torture tu ne abhi kya dekha hai? Woh toh ab dekhegi”. That, of course, summed up the film.

DURGAMATI

We sat up the moment we heard that the mammoth Telugu hit Bhaagamathie had been picked up for a Bolly remake. The fact that G. Ashok, the director of the original, had been signed up to helm this one gave us hope. But nothing could really prepare us for the train wreck that Durgamati turned out to be. Playing out over an agonising 155 minutes (for the record, that’s a good 45 minutes longer than Radhe) Durgamati — led by Bhumi Pednekar — dealt in everything from magic to mumbo-jumbo, haunted mansion to possessed humans, but turned out to be more ha-ha than horror. Bhumi, otherwise a competent actor, was completely out of depth, doing nothing more than screeching her way through this yawn fest. Yawn fest did we say? Even leading man Karan Kapadia (functioning as a prop in a film produced by brother-in-law Akshay Kumar) had to struggle to keep his eyes open. Oh, that’s his general look? Aah, well....

SADAK 2

Given the furore around Sushant Singh Rajput’s demise, the odds were heavily stacked against Sadak 2, with public sentiment inexplicably built against the Bhatts. But even otherwise, nothing could have saved the film, given just how bad it was. Coming 29 years after Sadak — a film which still remains memorable — and marking Mahesh Bhatt’s return to the director’s chair after two decades, Sadak 2 had a winner of a cast — Sanjay Dutt returned from the original, with Alia Bhatt being directed by dad Mahesh for the first time, and Aditya Roy Kapur as eye candy is always welcome. But the film took a circuitous route from the get-go, ending up as both (unintentionally) laughable and laboured. Pooja Bhatt stared out of a black-and-white photograph throughout the film, Aditya Roy Kapur strutted around with an owl called Kumbhkaran, Dutt’s Ravi started singing every time someone pulled a gun on him, Makarand Deshpande’s junk jewellery-sporting godman danced around like a man possessed and in the climax, we were treated to a mountain peak that lit up and started ‘speaking’ to humans. Sadak 2 was, undoubtedly, peak 2020.

COOLIE NO 1

Anyone trying to remake a Govinda film always has our goat. Why? Because you really can’t do a Govinda better than Govinda. So we were anyway apprehensive when David Dhawan decided to remake his 1995 comedy hit, with son Varun stepping into Govinda’s shoes (and clothes). We decided to cut the new film some slack, but Coolie No. 1, released in December 2020, didn’t deserve any of it. ‘Death by torture’ was the only way to describe this harebrained howler where the humour seemed to have walked straight out of a public toilet — sexist jokes, body-shaming scenes, stale slapstick and, of course, a plot that made no sense, but also one which didn’t justify Bollywood’s favourite leave-your-brains-behind-at-home excuse for anything pathetic. “Mozzarella cheese ki aulad” is a legit insult in this film. And did we mention that the climax has Varun walking around in a pink nurse’s uniform?

LAXMII

‘If 2020 had a face, it would end up looking like Laxmii’ is what I had written in my review. Well, it could be true for even 2021, and perhaps even more so. Traversing the spectrum of tone-deaf and terrible, hammy and horrific, Laxmii — last year’s Radhe in terms of big budget and star power — was a consistent two-hour exercise in facepalm. Billed as a horror-comedy, the film — with Akshay Kumar transitioning into a transgender after being possessed (brought on by sipping on a cup of lemongrass tea, go figure) — was neither funny nor scary. In fact, instead of championing the cause of the marginalised section at its centre, Laxmii came off as transphobic, added to its Hindu-Muslim tokenism and its unabashed and needless display of religious iconography. The only thing Laxmii did was demonstrate Akshay’s ease with a sari. But that’s not a sight we want to subject ourselves to anytime soon.