'Movie Review: Mr Joe B Carvalho'

'Mr Joe B Carvalho'
U/A; Comedy
Director: Samir Tewari
Cast: Arshad Warsi, Soha Ali Khan

If Joe B Carvalho is how the year begins, suddenly all hope seems lost for 2014. It falls under pathetic attempt at comedy. This 130 minute-long drivel deserves to be dumped in some isolated island where wild animals hopefully will shred it to bits or perhaps at best kept in film schools on how not to make a film.

Arshad Warsi and Soha Ali Khan in Mr Joe B Carvalho

Clearly with not a single minute of sensible thought put behind it, Joe B Carvalho comes across as a shallow, embarrassment of a movie. Arshad Warsi plays a bumbling, small-time detective called, ya you guessed it right, Joe B Carvalho. It is clear that the script writer, screenplay writer or whoever is the culprit, had one flash of an idea about this name and decided to write many lame jokes around it, and then accommodate some lamer ones to accompany them.

It is difficult to believe that someone was paid to write dialogues like ‘Kuch loge?' ‘Yeh kuch kya hai?' ‘Maane chai ya coffee?'. Or ‘Tum stage karti ho - kaunsa theatre?' ‘Operation theatre'. The quality of ‘funny' lines are so juvenile that even a kindergarten kid might want to roll his/her eyes.

And oh, there is a good amount of insensitivity too. A visually-challenged woman is made to fall off galleries, trees, buildings etc in the name of comedy. A child is hurled outside the window for no apparent reason.

If you are still interested in the storyline, here it is. So Joe is running around looking for petty detective jobs, when he encounters a man (Shakti Kapoor), who wants him to trace his daughter who's eloped with his cook. Joe ends up getting involved in another racket which involves a hired killer Carlos (Javed Jafferi). In the process, Joe also bumps into his estranged girlfriend (Soha), who is a dreaded cop. Joe and girlfriend go into flashback mode to happier days and after clearly one of the most bizarre and senseless scene in the history of Hindi cinema, she dumps him. Now, Joe has to win back his girlfriend's love and also get the job in hand done.

Not denying Arshad Warsi's talent but his choice of film speaks louder this time. He looks like a sore thumb sticking out in this milieu of nonsense and deservedly so. The otherwise capable actors like Vijay Raaz, Vrijesh Hirjee and the camp manage to merge themselves into this cacophony and end up hamming their way out of it.

There have been some bizarre, irreverent films that were also great fun. But those films have had some brilliant thinking gone into it. This one is surely not it. Avoid it.