Review: Dokyala Shot
Cast: Suvrat Joshi, Prajakta Mali, Ganesh Pandit, Omkar Govardhan, Rohit Haldikar & Sameer Choughule
Director: Shivkumar Parthasarathy
Viewpoint: ‘Dokyala Shot’ has a certain sense of novelty to it, because of it’s overall tone of comedy which mixes situational humor & slapstick humor together but the convenient turns it takes in the narrative are totally devoid of logic. Even if it’s intentional it keeps bothering us as more work on the script could have easily made the film lot more interesting.
What Works?
- The film’s lead cast is of four friends out of whom one (Suvrat Joshi) is suffering from retrograde amnesia (temporary memory loss). His friends played by Ganesh Pandit, Rohit Haldikar & Omkar Govardhan are somehow responsible for this condition and are now trying to make him alright. And all of this has happened just before two days of his wedding! The first half is full of sublime performances of all the four actors. The chemistry between them is instantly believable.
- The dialogue writing compliments the performances which makes many little moments (especially in the first half) uniquely hilarious.
- There’s one quality of a good situational comedy that the characters in the situation are actually very serious & the situation itself is a serious situation for them, but for the audiences those situations are presented such that they become funny. Here too this seriousness part is very effective. We understand that for the characters this isn’t all fun & games!
- There’s an undertone of a slight psychological suspense drama in the first half that is well included in the film through it’s treatment.
What Fails?
- The second half is extremely overstretched & that too in situations that are lesser important in the narrative.
- There’s a certain style of repetitive humor in the film, which is fine, & it even works well a couple of times but the film keeps overdoing it. Then it becomes a drag & the title of the film becomes our condition!
- As said earlier the narrative is conveniently designed just to makes certain situations happen, it is totally devoid of logic. We do understand that for a comedy of this kind logic can’t be a criteria to judge but still there’s a limit to the liberty one can take in this department.
- This film is an official remake of a Tamil film, while we are not sure if the original film had something to say through the film, but here we surely saw a possibility. It definitely isn’t a rule that a film should have something to say but when the film falters as an ‘entertainer’ we do look for a message or a statement & especially when the film is said to be based on a real incident!
Final Verdict: ‘Dokyala Shot’ surely deserves one watch as this is a fresh kind of humor for the Marathi audiences. While this film isn’t totally a great film the debutante director of the film Shivkumar Parthasarathy has shown a glimpse of his talent, which makes us anticipate for the movies he might come up with in the future.
Rating: 2.5/5
