Dhamaal 4 Movie Review: A pirate ship. A treasure hunt. Endless shouting, stomping and cartoonish chaos. A barrage of fat-shaming jokes. A few meta one-liners that don’t land. A bunch of skeletons. Three octopuses. One tiger. One cobra. One crocodile. Two dolphins with Ajay Devgn riding atop them. And histrionics. That’s Dhamaal 4 in a nutshell.
The fourth instalment in Indra Kumar’s Dhamaal franchise is rattling, loud and ludicrous. It goes above and beyond slapstick and brainrot. But full marks to the makers for their effort! They try every trick in the dusty handbook of comic capers to make you laugh. But somehow, none of the constant bickering, exaggerated movements, comical accidents and confusion land.Its idea of humour is painfully simple – slap a character, make them fall down, make them trip, hang them off a cliff and shove a knife into their buttocks. The film throws everything at the wall in the hope that something sticks. But very little does. Excess is the film’s guiding principle, which perhaps explains its relentlessly verbose storytelling. Everything is spelt out loud here.Every gag is explained, every beat underlined and every punchline repeated until there’s nothing left for the audience to discover on their own, proving Dhamaal 4 has little faith in its audience. And when nothing else works, a wrestling match is orchestrated between a plus-sized woman and a vertically challenged man belonging to a tribal community.
In all honesty, Dhamaal 4 operates on a threadbare, one-line plot – a bunch of people on a hunt to unravel some Shaitan Singh’s century-old gold that lies hidden in a cave deep inside a jungle. This is then stretched to form an overlong film. It starts off with an animated montage of a Bambaiya tapori-speaking guru in a ‘guru-cool’ narrating this story of Shaitan Singh.
The montage also has a cameo by Jackie Shroff. Cut to, we’re introduced to a pirate named Adhura and his gang on a mission to steal gold. They get into a scuffle with Prithvi, the only person who has the map to the cave. Enters Guddu, who fights Adhura as he feels only he has the right to own the treasure. In his spare time, Guddu tries to impress his girlfriend’s kids and win their approval.
