Hindi remakes of our regional cinema have always been there since decades and the idea has mostly worked whenever incorporated with some apt additions and much needed changes as per the Hindi speaking audience. Hence, before going into this particular direction, it is to be essentially understood that India is like a sum of many different regions, cultures and mindsets having their own lovable traditions and humour too. So a joke which might work in Bengal or Tamilnadu, may fall completely flat in MP, UP, Delhi or Punjab and the other parts of the country in all possibilities.
Therefore an almost scene to scene remake with just the translations made is not the right procedure to be followed and the director has to re-write the original script with all the major changes required keeping in mind his exact target audience and its key region. Unfortunately in his latest comic venture, veteran director Satish Kaushiksimply ignores and skips this most important step of making a remake and thus fails hugely in his attempt to deliver an enjoyable entertainer to the viewers. Moreover even the changes made to convert it in a Mumbai kind of film also prove to be a big downer, resulting in a quite weak product as per director's own set standards in the past. An official remake of Bengali hit BHOOTER BHABISHYAT (2012) directed by Anik Dutta, the film is supposedly a horror comedy which is neither spooky nor comic with almost 'none' entertaining moments in its 2 hours of badly written stuff performed by many known names.
It begins well but then takes too much time to come to the point (almost 20-25 minutes), before introducing the entire cast. Its basic plot talking about a joint home for a group of ghosts coming from various regions and time periods is surely interesting enough with a great potential to exploit. But the poor writing simply ruins everything and the silly adaptation even becomes unbearable in its second hour with too many forced in sequences and below average songs. Moreover the climax unimpressively tries to bring in the satire element too in vain, pointing towards the construction mafia operating in the major cities.
In the performance section, the entire cast ensemble including names such as Anupam Kher, Saurabh Shukla, Jackie Shroff, Chunkey Pandey, Yashpal Sharma, Rajpal Yadav, Rajesh Khattar, J. Brandon Hill, Vijay Verma and Meera Chopra utterly fail to deliver any kind of enjoyable act and the only two actors who do manage to leave some kind of impact remain Parambrata Chatterjee (also there in the original too) and Sharman Joshi. Taking about its comedy, the single joke which actually works comes from the veteran Asrani saying, "Main To Gareeb Aadmi Hun" in a hilariously helpless mode repeatedly. Mahie Gill tries hard to generate some laughter with her old time dialogue delivery style but she strangely gets only a few scenes in the film, contrary to what was being promoted in its promotional campaign. The camera-work doesn't add anything special in the film's mediocre treatment and the same can be said about its background score or art direction too coming up with nothing above the routine.
In all, this is a perfect example of how poor writing can make a complete mess of a fine, novel plot and also a film which clearly indicates that a remake should not be made just as a mere translation of the original taking the easy path (& avoiding all the re-working required essentially). On a concluding note, only a few weeks before we saw TOTAL SIYAPAA being rejected due to the same mistake made and now its GANG OF GHOSTS also strongly proving the point once again.
