Bin Bulaye Baraati Movie Review: An Uninvited, Unmitigated Disaster

It is unfathomable, what was going through director Chandrakant Singh's mind when he set out to direct a film like Bin Bulaye Baraati. With "actors" Aftab Shivdasani and Priyanka Kothari in "leading" roles, watching this plotless wonder… errr... blunder, is like doing a disservice to Indian cinema.

The senseless story of Bin Bulaye Baraati revolves around a gang of thieves lead by AD (Aftab Shivdasani), with a pair of bumbling brothers, Murari (Rajpal Yadav) and Hazari (Sanjay Mishra) and a smooth talker called Chetta Singh (Vijay Raaz). When AD falls in love with Shreya (Priyanka Kothari), the niece of a buffoon like cop, PP (Om Puri), the bunch goes on the run, coming in possession of a bag with Rs. 50 crores worth of jewelry, which belongs to an anachronistic daaku called Durjan Singh (Gulshan Grover), who has been ruling, or ruining, a Chambal village with an iron fist for decades. Fate takes a moronic turn when AD's bunch lands in said village, and pretends to be cops set to bring in winds of change and end Durjan's reign there.

Nothing in Bin Bulaye Baraati makes even an iota of sense; why the gang chooses to take the rural stopover when they're in possession of a major fortune, why the police does nothing about Durjan's penchant for cop killing, what is so funny about Johnny Lever's transgender act, or anything else, indeed. Director Singh's film seems to solely be an effort to see how far he can abuse the audience's interest and intelligence and get away with it. He doesn't get very far.

The actors and characters here are all uniformly irritating. Aftab Shivdasani's lead role days are far behind him and here, as AD, he seems to be grappling at straws trying to make it work, though it doesn't happen. Priyanka Kothari's act as Shreya sees her reaffirming her status as Bollywood's worst actress, with all the screen presence and skill of a wet sock.

For all his claims of being shortchanged by the Bollywood mainstream, Om Puri earns himself no credit by taking up such movies, as does Gulshan Grover. Johnny Lever, Vijay Raaz, Rajpal Yadav and Sanjay Mishra, all talented actors are content in pigeonholing and typecasting themselves in roles such as the ones they play here.

Bin Bulaye Baraati is possibly one of the worst films of the year so far. With nothing going for it, this terrible attempt at comedy is more an uninvited, unmitigated disaster than anything else, and should be avoided at all costs.