Jai Ho Democracy: Making a mess of it

Jai Ho Democracy
Starring: Om Puri, Annu Kapoor, Satish Kaushik, Seema Biswas, Adil Hussain, Aamir Bashir, Grusha Kapoor
Rated: 4.5/10
The star cast draws you into this title obvious satire but just a few sequences later you start getting annoyed. With such potent names on board, it should have been a powerful political satire which should have made you laugh, think and regret all in one go. No so, sadly. The director and the storywriter stymie the biggies with their childish attempt which goes in all the wrong directions without much thinking. The premise is wrong; the writer is all so confused with the subject matter that there is no thread to the sequences. A spoof of escalation at the border over a rooster in the no-man’s land and a Parliamentary committee set up in Delhi to decide whether to turn it into a war for the rooster is all what this film is about.
All the so called moments in the film are hemmed and helmed by Annu Kapoor while the rest of the veteran talent is wasted sitting around him. Kapoor’s command over the South Indian persona is incredible. His diction, his body movements and his get-up everything was near perfect. Om Puri was wasted as was Satish Kaushik and Seema Biswas.
All one can say is that the characters were well chosen — Biswas with a hint of Mamata Banerjee in her, the Defence Minister sitting in Canada resembling Mayawati, Kaushik looking and behaving like Devi Lal, someone like Omer Farooq and Adil as the retired Armyman from the North-east-turned MP. Adil caught the imagination with his lingo but the rest were so cruelly wasted that the anger only grew.
Jai Ho Democracy is a film that could have been great but falls flat to the naivety of its conceivers. 
Source: Sunday Pioneer, 26 April, 2017

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