Kunal Kemmu’s Madgaon Express belongs to a bygone era. Like the one that patronises young men with sayings like ‘boys will be boys’ – romanticising their ineptitude, while laughing with and at their foolhardiness. It’s the Dumb and Dumber-meets-Andaz Apna Apna flavour of comedy – where the male protagonists have questionable intelligence and are irreversibly on the wrong side of luck, so it’s hard for anything to go smoothly. In a film like this, a cup of chai will not merely be sipped by someone, like it usually happens in films. The cup will slip from said person’s hand, spill onto the adjacent person, who will accidentally drop the leash of their pet, which will run away and get electrocuted by the nearby electric pole. Or such are the gags. You get the drift?
It’s not to say that such films are too ‘dated’, because the writing can hold a surprise every now and then. It’s something we saw glimpses of in Amar Kaushik’s Stree (2018) – a film that used the mould of a ‘boys comedy’ to deliver commentary far more progressive than many of us would have expected from a film like that.
Kunal Kemmu – who made a name for himself with his glorious comic-timing in films like Go Goa Gone (2013) and Lootcase (2020) – makes his directorial debut here. The film follows three childhood friends – Dodo (Divyenndu), Pinku (Pratik Gandhi) and Ayush (Avinash Tiwary) – desperate to make good on their plan for a Goa vacation. Excel Entertainment – the production house which seems to have patented the premise of three friends going on a trip — is the producer here. So, while the intent is to slight earlier films made by Excel like Dil Chahta Hai and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, the self-awareness feels too airbrushed and smug.
I laughed the loudest when the three friends reach a Goa shack and sipping a beer each, and Dodo asks the other two: “Enjoy ho raha hai na? (we’re enjoying, right?)”. A scene later, two of them are arguing with a jet-ski instructor about how they don’t want to ride pillion because that’s not how it is shown in Dil Chahta Hai. It’s also in this very scene that director Kemmu makes a special appearance as a dopey stranger sitting at a bar, distributing drugs to the three friends by calling them ‘background music’ for their Goa trip. It’s where the film teases how funny it could’ve been as the realistic, antithesis version for all the road trips glorified in Bollywood. However, things get far more conventional after this.
A still from Madgaon Express.
A wild night, three childhood friends, a convenient switch of bags at a railway station which embroils them in a drug deal – Madgaon Express’s plot isn’t nearly as crazy in a post-Hangover world. A lot of it is familiar, like someone accidentally overdosing on cocaine, eccentric Dons played by Upendra Limaye and Chhaya Kadam and the wisecracks from their respective gangs.
Most of the cast does what is expected of them, especially Divyenndu with his straight-faced lies and ill-timed rebuttals. But it’s Gandhi who walks away with the film, given his portrayal of the frail germaphobe Gujarati boy who transforms into something a Sandeep Reddy Vanga hero would look up to. I could somehow never quite buy the friendship between the three men, given how easy it is to pick apart Dodo’s ‘fake life’ on Facebook. I kept waiting for the friends to come clean to Dodo, instead of the other way round. I was hoping they would tell him how they knew he was a penniless, unemployable man-child, but didn’t bring it up earlier to save him the embarrassment. Alas, they don’t and Dodo gets an entire scene of a melodramatic confession – where a few tears resolve the whole thing.
Kemmu gives away his gaze during the scenes when Gandhi and Divyenndu crossdress into sarees to infiltrate a drug den. There are repeated references to the men to ‘adjust their oranges’ with the background score harking back to the ‘90s Govinda movies. Kemmu’s collaborators – Raj & DK – would never go for such low hanging fruits (the pun is unfortunate).
Humour can often be subjective, and it’s impossible to write a genuinely funny line that doesn’t lose steam by the time it changes hands hundreds of times, by the time it reaches the audience in a theatre. Looking at all that, one could call Madgaon Express a respectable, adequate debut. As the film’s final few minutes culminate into a Mexican standoff inside a train bogey, I kept hoping that the film would fly into somewhere completely unexpected. Alas, it stays right there. Maybe it’s fitting that the catchiest song in the film is called ‘Not Funny’.
