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 I'd like to give 'Dana Dan' to everyone involved with this abomination.
Grade: F
De Dana Dan
Indian Release Date: 27/11/09
CBFC Classification: U/A
Running Length: 2 Hours 42 Minutes
Cast: Akshay Kumar, Katrina Kaif, Sunil Shetty, Paresh Rawal, Sameera Reddy, Archana Puran Singh, Aditi Govitrikar, Neha Dhupia, Chunky Pandey, Johnny Lever, Manoj Joshi, Asrani, Vikram Gokhale, Sharat Saxena, Shakti Kapoor, Rajpal Yadav
Director: Priyadarshan
Screenplay: Priyadarshan
Cinematography: N.K. Ekhambram
Music: Pritam Chakraborty
If 2009 could provide me one reason for suicide then Akshay Kumar’s movies would be enough for me to be never heard from again. I believe this man & his directors have taken it upon themselves to ensure piece by piece my sanity is lost each time I watch any of the abominations he calls his movies.
I guess Akshay Kumar learnt the word Hara-kiri somewhere late last year & took it as a New Year resolution for 2009. The year began with ‘Chandni Chowk to China’ which I thought was simply the law of averages catching up with Akshay Kumar & him giving his first true-blue disaster after a string of hits but little did I know that the movies which lay ahead would progressively get worse than the ones which came before. However when I saw the promos for De Dana Dan I had some hope for redemption considering it was the reunion of the same team which had given us the excellent ‘Hera Pheri’, alas all that hope was only a mirage in a desert of decadence.
The movie’s sorry excuse for a plot gives us a potpourri of various characters that seem to run into each other with alarming regularity only to either scream at or kick or perform some other exercise in excess. Even mentioning the details of the preposterous plot is likely to make a blood cell burst in my brain but since I nearly passed out watching this flick I wouldn’t want you to share my fate.
Nitin (Akshay Kumar) & Ram (Sunil Shetty) are two guys working in Singapore who are sorely down on their luck. To make a quick buck so that they can marry their sweethearts they come up with a scheme to kidnap Nitin’s boss’s dog, which goes horribly wrong leading to a case of mistaken identities. In the meanwhile the other major subplot which acts as a crutch to the non-existent central plot comprises of a debt-ridden businessman (Paresh Rawal) who wants to marry his son (Chunky Pandey) off to the daughter of the family which can give him the most dowry. More madcap characters get added to the proceedings as the movie moves forward which all culminates in a good chunk of the film taking place entirely in the confines of a hotel which curiously reminded me of another disaster this year David Dhawan’s ‘Do Knot Disturb’ & last year’s equally bad ‘One Two Three’.
Having a minimalist plot hasn’t stopped Priyadarshan from making some half-decent comedies before. The low-brow loud humor & some effective performances made them worth a glance at least, but with De Dana Dan’s overlong running length, uniformly bad acting by the entire cast, inane dialogues & moldy rotten jokes Priyadarshan seems to have touched a new low in filmmaking.
Humor based on mistaken identities has gotten old as the hills in Hindi movies & recycling the same material from the past ten years doesn’t help matters. Even the side actors are playing the same old characters which they have essayed a thousand times before, right from Archana Puran Singh’s bitchy boss to Shakti Kapoor’s lecherous playboy to Rajpal Yadav’s amoral waiter. Though compared to the leads & their love interests the smaller character actors seem to have more of a personality. The entire climax involving the flooding of the hotel was painful to behold simply because of the gratuitous wastage of water for such an asinine scene. The music is quite forgettable & the songs keep on popping up randomly with no rhyme or reason.
If Chandni Chowk to China, 8x10 Tasveer, Kambakkht Ishq or Blue didn’t entice you to slit your wrists then De Dana Dan is sure to effortlessly bring out that good old feeling in you.
Final Verdict: The movie is an excellent cure for the will to live.
Grade: F
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