Over the years, we have learned what to expect of a Rohit Shetty film—crass humour, oversaturated colour palette, problematic politics, middling performances, vehicles getting blown in slow motion, and a few chuckles amid all the frippery. However, even if you go to watch his latest, Cirkus, with zero expectations, you’ll still find yourselves hugely disappointed. It’s that kind of mind-numbingly bad.
Written by Farhad Samji, Sanchit Bedre, and Vidhi Ghodgaonkar, the film revolves around two sets of identical male twins who are swapped at birth by a scientist as an experiment to prove his theory that it’s not our parentage, but how we are raised, that decides who we become. Curiously, both sets of boys are named Roy (Ranveer Singh) and Joy (Varun Sharma). One set grows up in Ooty as the sons of a circus owner. The other, in a wealthy business family in Bengaluru. As chance would have it, years later, the Bengalurean pair visits Ooty for work, setting the stage for confusion and drama.
Cirkus is not the first Hindi film to be inspired from William Shakespeare’s play The Comedy of Errors, but it is unarguably the worst. It takes real talent to waste an interesting premise and a motely group of talented actors such as Singh, Sharma, Sanjay Mishra, and Johnny Lever, the way Shetty does in this snooze-fest. Everything about this film is unimaginative, unfunny, and an absolute drag. Including its protagonist pair.
Singh gives an uncharacteristically poor performance. Despite playing two people, he is so one-note, it hurts. At no point in the film can you tell his two Roys apart, such is the homogeneity of his approach to playing the double role. I sorely missed Sanjeev Kumar, who plays the same role in Gulzaar’s 1982 film Angoor with incredible nuance and personality.
Sharma, who was a delight to watch in films such as Fukrey (2013) and Chhichhore (2019), is belittled as a sidekick with not one memorable moment in the 138 minutes that Cirkus demands of your life. Deven Verma plays his role in Angoor with such effortless ease and ingenuine brilliance, that I couldn’t stop marveling at the finesse of his craft for days after I first watched the classic. But Cirkus gives Sharma no such opportunity to shine or show what he’s capable of.
The same is true of the two heroines. Jacqueline Fernandez plays candy floss for the 2,396th time. Pooja Hegde plays Mala, Ooty-Roy’s wife who writes crime novels under a male pseudonym. Her writing is given as much importance in the film as the circus that her husband runs, which is less than perfunctory. She is shown by her writing desk just once in the entire film and the circus never becomes anything more than a kaleidoscopic backdrop to make use of Ooty: Joy’s strange superpower—he’s a human conductor who suffers no shock on contact with electricity. Instead, every time he touches a live wire, it’s the Bengaluru-Roy who gets the electric shock. And whenever he does, he dances like a hero of the 1970s (the film is set in that period), with his tongue out, as popular songs of the time play in the background.
Cirkus is as bizarre and pointless as its spelling. But in spite of it all, what pained me the most was to see Mishra as Rai Bahadur, Fernandez’s character’s loony father. He gets to mouth the most inane, offensive lines and gets slapped by the two Roys at least thrice. Reducing an actor of his stature and caliber to such an insufferable buffoon is anything but funny. But then, what do I know?
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