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'Mard ko Dard Nahin Hota' (2018) is a zany, comic-book style action comedy powered by director Vasan Bala and his writing team's crazily inventive imagination for absurd characters. So we have a childish lead with congenital insensitivity to pain who fancies himself a Kung Fu master (Abhimanyu Dassani), an actual karate master who has lost a leg and his self-esteem after becoming an alcoholic (Gulshan Devaiah), a timid woman who turns into a fiesty fighter in the world outside her home (Radhika Madan) and a banana chip-eating south-Indian security boss who never gets his own hands dirty in the many street fights he orchestrates and oversees (Gulshan Devaiah again in a double role). This mad gang is completed by a benevolent yet somewhat reckless grandfather (a fantastic Mahesh Manjrekar) and a quaking, feckless father (Jimit Trivedi).
While the acting performances are all top-notch, the action scenes strikingly realistic and the eclectic soundtrack catchy, the film is undone by a threadbare plot and frustratingly underwritten character arcs. Various subplots go nowhere, the entire first half is an indulgent setup and many interesting questions are raised but left unexplored: whether familial bonds empower or bind us, whether superheroes are strong or weak, and whether gender roles make any sense.
The pacing is a major problem: the overuse of slow motion, sudden changes of tone (from comedy to drama to action) and jumpy editing mean that a lot of the scenes don't quite land where they should. A zany caper should be fast-paced, an absurd film should either loosen all ties with reality or attempt to use its tone to deal with real-world issues, a comedy should ideally make you laugh more consistently than I did (only three times in the entire runtime).
But 'Mard Ko Dard Nahin Hota' is neither here nor there. Only surprisingly inventive for the first fifteen minutes, the novelty of the genre soon wears off and starts testing your patience. Critics have raved about the myriad references sprinkled throughout the film, but too many odes only a pastiche does make. The concept is great, I just wish the makers had risen above being derivative and clever and actually given us characters we could root for/laugh at wholeheartedly instead.
Genre: Action, Comedy
Language: Hindi
Runtime: 2h 14 min
Year of release: 2018
Streaming platform: Netflix
Hot take is a series in which I offer my first impressions of films from India and around the world.
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