Cirkus Review - A Juiceless Adaptation of Angoor

Rohit Shetty's Cirkus has a big cast that includes Ranveer Singh, Pooja Hegde, Jacqueline Fernandez, Varun Sharma, and many other comedy actors that are loved by audiences, but the show doesn't do justice to the names. William Shakespeare made The Comedy of Errors in the 16th century and gave the world an immortal formula for crazy entertainment. Bollywood has made Ram Aur Shyam, Seeta Aur Geeta, Judwaa, and countless other films on the same formula of twins. The legendary writer Gulzar made Angoor on a very small budget and with a not-so-famous cast compared to others and showed them that good content cannot be bought with money. That vision and storytelling cannot be bought, copied, or remade. You have to have it in yourself. Rohit Shetty, who has the most 100-crore grossers for any Bollywood director, was so busy with money spinners that he didn't pay attention to this thing. Cirkus has lavish sets, a big scale, a huge cast, and a big director, but all that goes to waste because it has a tiny content. From writing, screenwriting, performances, music, and direction, Cirkus is the biggest disappointment of the year that nobody expected.Cirkus is adapted from Angoor but set against a different backdrop. It revolves around a funny doctor's experiment in which two pairs of twin brothers can live separately, with one of them staying with the other. Roy (Ranveer Singh) and Joy (Varun Sharma) are adopted by a rich family in Bengaluru, while the other pair is adopted by a middle-class family and have a circus of their own in Ooty. What happens when one pair of Joy and Roy travel to the town of the other pair is all you get to see in Cirkus. It involves a lot of misunderstandings, relationships, robberies, electric current, and chaos. One of our Roys is married, while the other is about to be married. Naturally, the misunderstanding implicates their love interests too.Just like the ancient circus, the film Cirkus is damn outdated. Forget Angoor's entire runtime; it does not even match 1/10th of it. Even the last 10 minutes of Charlie Chaplin's cult classic Circus (1928) are 10 times funnier than this 138-minute loud show. What Farhad Samji, Sanchit Bedre, and Vidhi Ghodgaonkar have written should be sent to the film library to educate people about how not to write a script. The screenplay is even more dumb. Even a KG student can easily point out mistakes here. Which doctor can have the patience to wait for years to see what his one experiment has done? Didn't he do anything else for years? Having a film based in an outdated era is fine; many writers and filmmakers do it, but what's the need for using outdated execution? Why can't the character be organic and funny? Making cringe faces, busted organs, and shock-giving moments is not enough to make one laugh. Why do you need to use old songs to make our ears bleed? Cirkus is a flop show there.Talking about performances, it seems that there was a competition among the cast members to see who would do worse. I respect the comedy legends, and I know how difficult it is to act in this genre. I myself had become a topic of hush-hush in school days when I tried a 2-minute stand-up comedy act. Ranveer Singh had a blast last Christmas with 83, delivering his career-best performance, but 2022 has left two black spots on his emerging, illustrious career. Jayeshbhai Jordaar and now Cirkus: Why Ranveer? Why? How on earth can Gully Boy and '83 be followed by these two duds? Pooja Hegde doesn't even try. Radhe Shyam, Beast, Acharya, and now Cirkus—dear Pooja Hegde, you could do a lot better, or should I say you deserved better. In her first verbal dialogue, Jacqueline Fernandez yells, "Daddy!" Just one word, and you know the game is over. Even the re-recorded accents of Pran, Jeevan, and  Prem Chopra would have sounded better than the original sound that Sanjay Mishra generated. Varun Sharma is there, but you have to remind yourself of that so often. Siddharth Jadhav, Murali Sharma, Mukesh Tiwari, and Vrajesh Hirjee have done decently despite badly written characters. Johny Lever is completely wasted. I mean, can you believe it? How can someone waste THE JOHNY LEVER, and that too in a comedy film?! The rest of the cast has nothing impressive either, so why waste a couple of lines?Cirkus is a high-scale production with good support from the technical team. Current Laga is the only saving grace in the music album, and wouldn't you love the wild dance steps of Deepika Padukone. The cinematography is neat, the background score keeps you busy, and the locations and sets are eye-pleasing, though some of them look fake and banal. The VFX work didn't provide details on the final output. Cirkus' dialogues might just go down in history books as one of the worst written dialogues for a Rohit Shetty film. "Main wafadaar hu, Maine aapka Kela khaya hai," "Itte-cock se hua," and "Municipality" will annoy you. How can Rohit expect us to hear these double-meaning jokes with our families in cinemas? Where are those clean family films by him? Every single laugh is forceful and inessential. What's wrong with Rohit that he got to this level? I never expected this. Yes, I know he's not making those high-repeat value films like Golmaal: Fun Unlimited and Singham nowadays, but he was doing fine with those decent entertainers that can be least watched at once. I agree, Bollywood has gone wrong in 2022 and has not made good comedies for over a decade, but nobody expected this kind of fall. Cirkus is a king-sized disheartenment. Who'd expected the last Bollywood release of the year to be so bad and tortuous? Even the wasted scenes of Angoor would have made me laugh more than what this entire film has done.